“Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.”
THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, Chapter VI, p. 305.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
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Bernard Bailyn 27
American historian 1922Related quotes

“Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority.”
Dancing Aztecs (1976)
Context: Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)
Address at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (9 June 1957).
Context: Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

“For one heat, all know, doth drive out another,
One passion doth expel another still.”
Monsieur D'Olive, Act V, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).