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:
“If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign to us: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“To-day ... when material prosperity and well earned ease and luxury are assured facts from a national standpoint, woman’s work and woman’s influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a heart power into this money getting, dollar-worshipping civilization; needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and interests of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land versus gain and greed and grasping selfishness.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“What arouses the indignation of the honest satirist is not, unless the man is a prig, the fact that people in positions of power or influence behave idiotically, or even that they behave wickedly. It is that they conspire successfully to impose upon the public a picture of themselves as so very sagacious, honest and well-intentioned.”
—Claud Cockburn (1904–1981)