"Patrick Henry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." And that vision lent his words such burning eloquence that Wendell Phillips' speech in Faneuil Hall ranks with Patrick Henry's at Williamsburg and Abraham Lincoln's at Gettysburg—and there is no fourth. His vision led him unto obloquy also. What revilings were his! What bitter hatred! What insults and scoffs! At last the vision led him unto fame. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... audiences. But Sumner was always strong and effective, and that is, after all, the main point. Like Webster he possessed a logical mind, and the profound earnestness of his nature gave an equally profound conviction to his words. Besides this, Sumner possessed the heroic element, as Patrick Henry and James Otis possessed it. After Webster's death there was no American speaker who could hold an audience ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no single man of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for anything. Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as we found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects the rights ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... with it or to liberal culture or to both, (3) from the fact that the subject of their orations appealed forcibly to the interest of that special time, (4) from their character and personality. Most of what they said makes dry reading to-day, but we shall occasionally find passages, like Patrick Henry's apotheosis of liberty, which speak to the ear of all time and which have in them something of a Homeric ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... very good temper with the rulers of Great Britain, afterwards supplied the most military and the most determined element in Washington's armies, and gave to the Republic some of its most striking historical personalities: Patrick Henry and John Caldwell Calhoun, Jackson, the great President, and his namesake the ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... bent on vaster schemes than were dreamed of by the men around him. He had his spies out in the Northwestern Territory, and became convinced that with a small force of resolute backwoodsmen he could conquer it for the United States. When he went back to Virginia, Governor Patrick Henry entered heartily into Clark's schemes and gave him authority to fit out a force for ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with "inconceivable bravery," the head men walking about in the time of action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong, and fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns, disputing every foot of ground. ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... 403. You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured. For liberty ought to be the direct end of your government.—PATRICK HENRY, 1788; WIRT, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... schoolboy, and thought of going to college in time; and had vague thoughts of becoming a great orator like Patrick Henry, whose speeches I used to speak on the stage; but now, I was a poor friendless boy, far away from my home, and voluntarily in the way of becoming a miserable sailor for life. And what made it more bitter ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the Declaration, was of the family of Richard Lee, who had gone to invite Charles II. to Virginia. Peyton and Edmund Randolph, president of the First Congress, and attorney-general were of the old royalist family. Archibald Cary, who threatened to stab Patrick Henry if he were made dictator, was a relative of Lord Falkland and heir apparent at his death to the barony of Hunsdon. Madison and Monroe were descended from the royalist families—the first from a refugee of 1653, the last from a captain in the army of Charles ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... was beaked like a hawk's, his lower was sharp as a lance, and between them issued that infuriated melody and cadence and epithet that old Patrick Henry's spirit might have migrated into from his grave in the Virginia woods. He suddenly flung himself from his vortex of song upon the bed of the sick man, with a twitching hop and rapid opening and shutting of the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend |
