Edmund S. Morgan Quotes & Sayings

What, then, of the liberated slaves and Indians? The saddest part of the story and perhaps the most revealing is that no one bothered to say. None of the accounts either of Drake's voyage or of the Roanoke colony mentions what became of them. — Edmund S. Morgan

Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not in it frequently found together, and it is seldom easy to distinguish between the first two. — Edmund S. Morgan

How, then, did Virginia gentlemen persuade the voters to return the right kind of people to the House of Burgesses? How could patricians win in populist politics? The question can lead us again to the paradox which has underlain our story, the union of freedom and slavery in Virginia and America. — Edmund S. Morgan

There is no denying that Francis Drake was a pirate and that the enterprise he conducted four years later in Panama was highway robbery, or at best, highjacking. But it was on the scale that transforms crime into politics. — Edmund S. Morgan

Every age has its own separatists. They are the intransigents, the undeviating purists who have to be right whatever the cost, who would sacrifice the world rather than compromise their own righteousness. — Edmund S. Morgan

And he wanted no more of those other Puritan specialties: schools and books. In Virginia, he said, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both! — Edmund S. Morgan

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come. — Edmund S. Morgan

The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did ... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much ... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields ... But you still did not grow much corn. — Edmund S. Morgan

These numbers gave Virginia's population about six times as large a proportion of gentlemen as England had. Gentlemen, by definition, had no manual skill, nor could they be expected to work at ordinary labor. — Edmund S. Morgan

I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience. You're born in one particular century at a particular time, and the only experience you can have directly is of the place you live and the time you live in. History is a way of giving you experience that you would otherwise be cut off from. — Edmund S. Morgan