Famous quotes containing the words american, revolution, europeans, pilgrims and/or puritans:
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“I have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers, father and son, to the late King to this his son. For ... it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and then back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; then to the Long Parliament; and thence to King Charles, where long may it remain.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“Like pilgrims to th’ appointed place we tend;
The world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.”
—Wendell Phillips (1811–1884)