We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection
Samuel AdamsRead
It does not take a majority to prevail... but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Interpretation
Change often begins with a passionate minority rather than the majority. A small, determined group can inspire significant societal shifts.
This quote by Samuel Adams emphasizes the power and effectiveness of a devoted minority in bringing about change and inspiring others. It suggests that it is not always the majority that drives progress, but rather a small, motivated group that can ignite ideas of freedom and instigate thoughts that encourage others to pursue change.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about grassroots movements and their impact.
We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection
Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.
If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves? We claim British rights not by charter only! We are born to them.
Let no man thirst for good beer.
He therefore 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 virtuous man.
We boast of our freedom, and we have your example for it. We talk the language we have always heard you speak.
A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation's young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.
It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.
All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.
If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society
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