A Short History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Told in Quotations from Some of Its Greatest...

A Short History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Told in Quotations from Some of Its Greatest Citizens

by A. S. Hamrah

“We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
-John Winthrop

“The noble craftsmen we promote,/Disown the knave and fool;/Each honest man shall have his vote,/Each child shall have his school.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational and happy.”
-Julia Ward Howe

“Our country is the world-our countrymen are all mankind.”
-William Lloyd Garrison

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
-Henry David Thoreau

“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this Commonwealth: ‘We do not imitate-for we are a model to others.’”
-John F. Kennedy

“Everywhere/giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/a savage servility/slides by on grease.”
-Robert Lowell

“Boston-spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming-has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade. Now, one supposes it is all over at last.”
-Elizabeth Hardwick

“Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me.”
-Emily Dickinson

“I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck.”
-Scott Brown

A. S. Hamrah is the film critic for n+1 and has a piece in the latest issue of The Baffler.