Читать книгу Our Founders' Warning - Strobe Talbott - Страница 7

O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destined Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible, — when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dreamed of your times.

—Nathaniel Ames, publisher of the first annual American almanac

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.

—John Adams, in a letter to Abigail, April 26, 1777

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

—George Washington’s Farewell Address