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Book: Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
Quotes of Book: Lafayette in the Somewhat
TOP TAGS :government-abuseold-ageremotecoherencepsychopathssilmarillionproximitytreason

  1. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists' most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What's more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after
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  2. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that November Knox and his brother set off for New York. Who knew they would return in January with forty-three cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers dragged across frozen rivers and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains on custom sleds. The is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter.
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  3. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    To establish such a forthright dream of decency, who wouldn't sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn't among them?
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  4. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free?
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  5. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Congress was soon neck-deep in arrogant boobs whom Beaumarchais or Deane had promised high ranks and higher salaries. "Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country . . . in a cause which is not their own" is how Deane rationalized the incentives to Congress."
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  6. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Americans' "fatal tendency of disunion.
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  7. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    disunity is the through line in the national plot-not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other's nerves is our right.
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  8. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Oh, if only that was the last time in America that the extreme left and extreme right broke down and made a mess of things, leaving everyone in the center to suffer."
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  9. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven.
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  10. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    The First Amendment, he explained, exposed tolerance as a sham, because tolerance implies one superior group of people deigning to put up with their inferiors. "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights," Washington wrote. "For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Of
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  11. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, "What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government-their cutting, not their sewing.
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  12. Sarah Vowell _ Lafayette in the Somewhat

    The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph-"I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence"-applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette's stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, "I described the perfect horse as one which, at the sight of the whip, had the sense to throw his rider to the ground before he could be whipped.
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