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A Short History of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Told in Quotations from Some of Its Greatest Citizens
"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.
—A. S. Hamrah