“The American Revolution continues. Instead of devouring its own children like the French and Russian Revolutions, it has produced more children: the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, immigrants from around the world, full citizenship for Jews, the Civil Rights movement. Further afield, the American idea has empowered the struggle for freedom all over the globe... Many great tasks lie before us if the United States is to live up to the ideals of George Washington: better treatment of prisoners, which he insisted upon; the abolition of the death penalty, which he came to abhor and used only when his back was against the wall; an end to the incarceration of Haitians or other immigrants without cause; care for the weaker members of our society; less emphasis on lotteries and more on honest work: campaign funding reform; an end to covert support of dictatorships, and many other things.”

“But Washington, as Franklin well knew, wanted no scepter. He had given his entire life, not for personal glory, but for the American nation. As Marcus Cunliffe writes in his widely respected book George Washington: Man and Monument, in the end he had no private life left at all. He bore the burden that was required of him as General and then as President, to disappear as a private individual into an ideal. “His very strength resided in a sobriety some took for fatal dullness…[but] in his own person [he] proved the soundness of America.””

“…Washington really was a man who hated lies and abhorred dishonor.”

“A man capable of being this imperious might easily have become intoxicated with self-importance. With Washington it was the opposite. The power that he sought, exercised and nurtured was not for himself. His every movement was directed toward the cause of his country.[23] Most of those who have written about Washington have noted the importance of his character in this regard. His good name and reputation were of the highest importance to him. He had aligned himself with the emerging idea of America, and any defect of character on his part would reflect badly on the great cause. He was fiercely protective of his reputation, not so much for himself as for the future of the country, for somehow he knew that the two were to become one.[24]”

“The colonists were fervent in their protestations of affection and attachment to the mother country almost up to the very eve of the Revolution. As late as 1775, a resolution drafted by Thomas Jefferson read, “we mean not to dissolve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us.”[12]”

“What I hope to convey here is the sense of wonder that one experiences in reading about the American Revolution. At almost every turn there is cause for amazement and awe that the whole effort did not come apart…”

“To have been in Philadelphia in the first days of July in 1776, knowing that the British had just landed 32,000 troops—a force larger than the population of Philadelphia—in Staten Island, just a day and a half’s march away, and to still declare independence? These are characters! These are stories!” - David McCullough