Cato's Letters - Influence

Influence

These letters also provided inspiration and ideals for the American Revolutionary generation. The essays were distributed widely across the thirteen colonies, and frequently quoted in newspapers from Boston to Savannah. Renowned historian Clinton Rossiter stated "no one can spend any time on the newspapers, library inventories, and pamphlets of colonial America without realizing that Cato's Letters rather than John Locke's Civil Government was the most popular, quotable, esteemed source for political ideas in the colonial period."

The Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank founded by Edward H. Crane in 1977, takes its name from Cato's Letters.

Read more about this topic:  Cato's Letters

Famous quotes containing the word influence:

    The higher the state of civilization, the more completely do the actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his fellow-citizens.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    ... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)

    You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.
    Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)