A Quote by Charles A. Beard
American government did not originate in any abstract theories about liberty and equality, but in the actual experience gained by generation after generation of English colonists in managing their own political affairs. The Revolution did not make a breach in the continuity of their institutional life.
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The Russian revolution did not occur until a generation after Marx's death. He was not involved with it, or with what came after it. His works do not describe post-capitalist society, and a fortiori they do not recommend any part of what the Soviet Union did.
If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.
It's very easy to leave when things go wrong, but to stick around and to basically give life to a town because of everything that it gave you generation after generation after generation, that to me is what defines a true American.
Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution...[they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity...[we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King...it was not the sort of Revolution that France's was...'Liberty, equality, fraternity' - they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.
I'm the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He went to work in the same lace mill every day for 50 years. He believed he passed it down to my dad, who passed it down to me, that if he did what he was supposed to do, he'd have a good life and his kids would have an even better life. That is the American dream. That is what we believe in, that's what we've got to keep going generation after generation.
The Donald Trump who showed up at this press conference, though he did extend his hand to President Pena Nieto, say, I consider you a friend, he said he talked about first-generation, second-
generation, third-generation Mexican-American, he said - his words here - he considers them beyond reproach.
What I like best about baseball is the continuity. Generation after generation can follow the game and get the same satisfactions year after year and bring to it the same interest and spirit. I want to take that with me into the next century.
My generation took on political equality. I believe young people, who have graduated into a poor economy, have an incentive to take on much tougher issues of income equality. If they show the leadership they have demonstrated in the last few elections, they can bring changes even greater than my generation achieved.
The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth.
Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves.
Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.
The upside of being a part of a post-civil rights generation is that black folks really are more diverse. But the flash point for that diversity is caught up in Hip Hop. So you have a generation that says, 'I'm gonna wear my sneakers, and I'm gonna wear my pants how I like themThen you have a generation that says, 'I did not get bit by dogs for you to conduct yourself this way. Then the younger generation says, 'Yes, you did. This is what freedom means.'
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
What I want to do is basically tell my generation's story about how music and culture helped affect a generation, and a generation that's so profound, that it went on to elect the first African-American president.
There's the generation that made the rules, the generation that codified them. The generation that broke them - that's mine. The generation that laughed at them - that's Tarantino's. And now there's a generation that doesn't know that there were any.
That is our generation’s task - to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.
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