No need to read between the lines of the following Quote of the Day excerpts
regarding Samuel Adams himself (sorry, it's not about beer).
By the way, the format reads better in wide screen view.
Sent from my iPhone
Warm Regards,
Charlie Hopkins
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ecwhitman@xxxxxxx
Date: September 26, 2016 at 21:18:25 PDT
To: Ecwhitman@xxxxxxx
Subject: Quotation of the Day
Curious ... In more than a decade of the
QOTD. I've never "done" this gent before...
It is not infrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty,
who if we may
judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it
but their own
liberty - to oppress without control or restraint of the laws all who
are poorer or
weaker than themselves.
- Samuel Adams
(essay in The Advertiser,
1748)
Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will
secure the liberty
and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He
there-
fore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries
most to promote
its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will
not suffer a
man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise
and vir-
tuous man.
- Ibid.
It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of
loyalty is the author-
ity and interest of one individual man, however dignified by applause
or enriched
by the success of popular actions.
- Adams
("Loyalty and Sedition,"
essay in The
Advertiser, 1748)
We cannot make Events. Our Business is wisely to improve them.
There
has been much to do to confirm doubting Friends & fortify the Timid.
It requires
time to bring honest Men to think & determine alike even in important
Matters.
Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.
- Adams
(letter to Samuel Cooper, 30
April 1776)
No one, in the year 1770, was better fitted than Samuel
Adams, either by
talent and temperament or the circumstances of his position, to push
the conti-
nent into a rebellion. Unlike most of his patriot friends, he had
neither private
business nor private profession to fall back on when public affairs
grew lame, his
only business, being, as one might say, the public business ...
- Carl L. Becker (1873-1945)
(The Eve of the Revolution)
(Today is the 294th anniversary of the birth of American patriot and
Founding Father
Samuel Adams (1722-1803) in Boston. Born into a religious and
politically active
family,* Adams graduated from Harvard College and was an unsuccessful
business-
man and tax collector before he became active in politics. As a member
of the
Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston Town Meeting,
Adams
became a strident firebrand in local resistance to Parliament's taxation
of the colo-
nial economy, which eventually led to the British occupation of Boston,
the Boston
Massacre, and the American Revolution. As a member of the Continental
Congress,
he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later helped
draft the Articles
Confederation and the Massachusetts Constitution. He followed John
Hancock as
4th governor of Massachusetts, and served in that capacity from 1794 to
1797.** In
a letter of 1776, he noted,
"How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain
Meaning
of Words!" )
* N.B. Fellow patriot and 2nd president of the United States John
Adams (1735-
1826) was a second cousin.
** Drawing on the tradition that he had been a brewer, the Boston Beer
Company
in 1985 created Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and it has become a
popular,
award-winning brand.
A portrait of Samuel Adams (ca. 1772) by John Singleton Copley.
He is
pointing to a copy of the early Massachusetts Charter, which he
wrote.
