“O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”

In 1781, a young French woman named Marie-Jeanne Philippon married wealthy businessman Jean-Marie Roland, thus becoming known as Madame Roland.

Madame Roland and her husband were early supporters of the democratic goals of the French Revolution. 

They became active leaders of the progressive but moderate pro-democracy party called the Girondists.

The Girondists supported changing France’s political system from an absolute monarchy to a more democratic constitutional monarchy, like England’s.

Unfortunately for the Rolands — and for French King Louis XVI and many other French citizens — a much more extreme group took control of France a few years after the storming of the Bastille.

They were called the Jacobins and were responsible for the infamous “Reign of Terror.” 

During that bloody period in 1793 and 1794, Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin leaders imprisoned and executed tens of thousands of French citizens.

The victims included members of aristocratic families who had benefited from the previous monarchical system, open or suspected supporters of Louis XVI, and advocates of any future monarchical system.

Others were killed simply because top Jacobins viewed them as political rivals or disliked them.

When the Rolands publicly criticized the worst excesses of the Reign of Terror, the Jacobins responded by ordering their arrest for “treason.”

Madame Roland was arrested and imprisoned in Paris in the spring of 1793.

Her husband Jean-Marie was traveling at the time.

When he heard his of wife’s imprisonment, he went into hiding.

On November 8, 1793, after months in prison, Madame Roland was sent to the guillotine, a few weeks after Marie Antoinette met the same fate.

On the way to her execution, Madame Roland passed a large statue of the Goddess Liberty that her former political comrades had erected nearby (the same goddess portrayed by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor).

According to historical accounts of the day, when Madame Roland saw the statue she looked at it sadly and made a remark that’s included in many books of famous quotations:

“O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!” (“O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”)

Shortly after saying these words, Madame Roland was beheaded.

After Jean-Marie Roland heard of his wife’s death, he wrote a suicide note that said: “From the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife, I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies.”

He attached the note to his chest.

Then he ran his cane-sword through his heart, becoming another victim of the Reign of Terror.

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As Maine goes, so goes: (a) the nation (b) Vermont . . .

In the November 1936 presidential election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was reelected for a second term in a landslide victory over his Republican opponent, Kansas Governor Alf Landon.

Roosevelt received more than 60% of the vote and won in all but two states – Maine and Vermont.

On November 4, 1936, the day after the election, Roosevelt’s campaign manager James A. Farley gave reporters what would now be called a good sound bite.

“As Maine goes, so goes Vermont,” he quipped.

Farley’s witty remark soon became a famous humorous political quotation.

It was especially funny to political observers because it’s a take-off on the older saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

What’s the origin of that venerable political proverb?

It is sometimes claimed to be based on the fact that Maine was the first state to enact a law prohibiting alcohol in 1851.

For example, an article published in the Boston Globe in 2000 said it “was coined at the peak of the state’s 19th-century temperance movement, in an era when New England shaped national opinion on fundamental issues from slavery to child labor to women's suffrage.”

But that temperance theory is wrong.

Nor is the saying based on Mainers’ record on votes for president.

In fact, historically, Mainers have voted for a higher percentage of losing presidential candidates than many other states.

The saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” primarily stems from the fact that Maine once held its state elections for Governor, U.S. Senators and Congressmen and other non-presidential offices in September – two months before other states.

The outcome of this unique early election was seen as an indication of how the political winds were blowing in general for the Democrat and Republican parties.

Maine’s September election, on the second Monday of the month, was created in its constitution in 1820, when it split from Massachusetts to became a separate state.

In presidential election years, Mainers also went back to the polls in November to vote on the presidential race.

In 1957, Maine changed its election law and, in 1960, started holding all general elections on the same November election dates as other states.

But even though Maine’s old September election tradition is gone, the saying “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” has lived on – as has James Farley’s update, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”

In 1972, some observers thought Maine gave a different sign of things to come in politics when it passed a law making it the first state to allow its electoral vote to be split. Under that law, the winner of each congressional district gets one electoral vote, and the winner of the statewide vote gets the state's remaining two electoral votes.

Supporters of that law touted it as a more democratic alternative to the traditional system of having all of a state’s electoral votes go to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes statewide.

As it turned out, the nation didn’t go that way. In 1996, Nebraska became the only other state to pass a similar law, though I don’t think it led anyone to start saying: “As Maine goes so goes Nebraska.”

NOTE: If you’d like to read more about the 1936 election, FDR and James Farley, I recommend the book Mr. Democrat: Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics.

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“Facts are stubborn things…”

In the years leading up to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the rebel-rousing Sons of Liberty used an engraving of what they called “The Boston Massacre” to encourage anti-British sentiments.
 
The engraving, done by Paul Revere, shows a line of British soldiers coldly firing their bayoneted muskets into a crowd of Americans, several of which lay bleeding on the ground.

A poem underneath that scene describes how the King’s men “With murderous Rancour stretch their bloody hands, Like fierce Barbarians grinning o'er their Prey.”

It was good propaganda. But it did distort what happened at the “Boston Massacre” on the night of March 5, 1770.

That night, a local resident got into an argument over a debt with a British soldier. Eight other British soldiers came out on the street to help their comrade. A group of Americans surrounded the soldiers. The Brits were soon being yelled at and pelted with snowballs, ice chunks and debris by the much larger, hostile crowd.

The bloodletting appears to have started when a mulatto seaman named Crispus Attucks hit one of the soldiers with a piece of wood. The soldiers panicked. Somebody yelled “Fire!” and they shot into the crowd, killing Attucks and four other Americans.

When the British soldiers were arrested and put on trial for murder, a Boston merchant asked local lawyer (and future president) John Adams to defend them. He agreed, knowing it would make him unpopular and could ruin his career.

Adams believed the soldiers deserved legal representation as a matter of principle. After looking into the incident, he also believed they were provoked and should not be executed for murder, as many Bostonians wanted.
 
On December 4, 1770, the second day of the brief trial, Adams gave his summation to the jury.

He argued that anyone might have reacted the same way the soldiers did in such a confusing and potentially life-threatening situation. He suggested Crispus Attucks was more to blame for “the dreadful carnage of that night” than the soldiers, because of his “mad behavior.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” Adams said, uttering what became a famous quotation. “And whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snow-balls, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter.”

The jury was persuaded. Six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two were found guilty of manslaughter and punished by having their thumbs branded.

Several years later, John Adams wrote in his diary that his defense of those British soldiers was “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.”

“Facts are stubborn things” became one of Adams' best known and oft-cited quotes. However, contrary to what I once thought, he didn't coin that line.

As noted by quote mavens Garson O'Toole on his Quote Investigator site and Dr. Mardy Grothe in his Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations, it was already a saying in England and America and dates back to at least the early 1700s.

Two centuries later, President Ronald Reagan uttered the most famous modern use and perceived “misuse” of that quote.
 
It came in his speech at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 15, 1988.

Reagan was there to speak in support of the current Republican presidential candidate, his Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was running against Democrat Michael Dukakis.

In the speech, Reagan recounted what he viewed as the successes of his administration and the reasons why he felt voters should elect another Republican as president.

Reagan repeated John Adam’s facts quote several times in the address. It was a rhetorical device he used in the part that focused on the economic problems he blamed on his Democratic predecessor, President Jimmy Carter.

“Before we came to Washington,” Reagan said, “Americans had just suffered the two worst back-to-back years of inflation in 60 years. Those are the facts, and as John Adams said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Interest rates had jumped to over 21 percent…Facts are stubborn things…The median family income fell 51/2 percent. Facts are stubborn things.”

Then he made what became one of his most-cited gaffes, saying:

“Fuel costs jumped through the atmosphere, more than doubling. Then people waited in gas lines as well as unemployment lines. Facts are stupid things.”

Reagan immediately corrected himself, adding: “Stubborn things, I should say.” But once the word stupid came out of his mouth, that’s the version that was picked up and cited by his critics.

Today, thousands of websites quote Reagan as saying “Facts are stupid things” as if it were somehow a significant quote — without noting that it came from a speech in which he said “stubborn things” several other times and quickly corrected his brief slip of the tongue.

Of course, thousands of others note that Reagan said “Facts are stubborn things” — without mentioning that he was quoting John Adams, thus creating the impression that Reagan coined the line.

When it comes to quotations on the Internet—and to politics—facts are often slippery things.

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“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

On July 16, 1964, at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater uttered his most remembered quotation in his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he said. “And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Those words quickly became both famous and infamous.

They resonated in a positive way with Conservative Republicans, who were beginning their long domination of the Republican Party.

Democrats, including the Democratic candidate, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson, pounced on them as proof that Goldwater was a dangerous war-mongering extremist who might be crazy enough to start a nuclear war. (A characterization masterfully capitalized on in the Johnson campaign’s notorious “Daisy ad.”)

It’s true that Goldwater believed America needed a strong military and should use it aggressively it to fight the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

But this view wasn’t really all that different from the position of most high-profile Democrats in the 1960s, including President John F. Kennedy and his Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who became president in November 1963 after Kennedy was assassinated.

Nonetheless, the Democrats’ portrayal of Goldwater as an extremist nut was effective and helped Johnson win a landslide victory in the November 1964 presidential election.

In the decades since then, Goldwater’s famous quote has also been misused to try to justify extreme positions or actions that bear little or no relation to what Goldwater actually believed or would have condoned.

For example, when the “Obamacare” health insurance legislation was approved by Congress, a protester hurled a brick through the office window of the Monroe County Democratic Committee headquarters in Rochester, New York. A note attached to the brick said “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

Barry Goldwater had strong libertarian views and was generally against big government.

But he would never have supported vandalism in the name of politics or liked having his words associated with it.

This seems clear not only from Goldwater’s political record, but also from the words he spoke right after the famous quote in his 1964 acceptance speech.

Here’s what he said in that key part of the address:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Why, the beauty of the very system we Republicans are pledged to restore and revitalize — the beauty of this Federal system of ours — is in its reconciliation of diversity with unity.

We must not see malice in honest differences of opinion, and no matter how great, so long as they are not inconsistent with the pledges we have given to each other in and through our Constitution.

Our Republican cause is not to level out the world or make its people conform in computer regimented sameness. Our Republican cause is to free our people and light the way for liberty throughout the world.

Ours is a very human cause for very humane goals.”

In this era of increasingly uncivil discourse, the sentences that come after Goldwater’s famous quotation are also worth remembering. 

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“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The quote “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” is often mistakenly attributed to the Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran and frequently to Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, Curran’s line was somewhat different. What he actually said, in a speech in Dublin on July 10, 1790, was:

       “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”

And, according to Jefferson scholars there is “no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ or any of its variants.”

Traditionally, the most famous use of “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” that’s included in books of quotations is from a speech made by the American Abolitionist and liberal activist Wendell Phillips on January 28, 1852.

Speaking to members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society that day, Phillips said:

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.”

However, Anna Berkes, a research librarian at The Jefferson Library, has discovered uses that predate Phillips’ speech.

In a post on the Jefferson Library blog, Berkes wrote:

“Not to be mean to Mr. Wendell Phillips, but he’s about to get slightly less famous. After two days of ridiculously feverish searching, I’ve traced the purported Phillips version of this quote all the way back to 1809.  (For the record, Mr. Phillips was -2 years old at that time.)”

Berkes noted that, in a biography of Major General James Jackson published in 1809, author Thomas Charlton used the same words, just in a different order.

Charlton wrote that that one of the obligations of biographers of famous people is “fastening upon the minds of the American people the belief, that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.’”

Berkes also found several news articles that include the more familiar version of the line as later used by Phillips.

For example, an article in the May 2, 1833 edition of The Virginia Free Press and Farmers' Repository says:

“Some one has justly remarked, that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ Let the sentinels on the watch-tower sleep not, and slumber not.”

One of the news articles she found, in the January 4, 1838 edition of the Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, uses the same quote and attributes it to Thomas Jefferson — one of the earliest sources to do so.

Berkes reiterated that the consensus of Jefferson scholars is that he never spoke or wrote the words “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

She also concluded that, although Wendell Phillips still gets credit for the most famous use of that phrase, it was already a well-known saying prior to his speech in 1852.

Many witty variations on this old saying have been created since then.

My personal favorite is by the novelist Aldous Huxley.

In his spoken introduction to the 1956 CBS Radio Workshop adaptation of his novel Brave New World, Huxley said: “The price of liberty, and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.”

Editor’s Note: Special thanks to reader Chris Cox for emailing me a correction on my original citation of the Huxley quote and for giving me the link to listen to the CBS Radio adaptation on the Internet Archive.

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“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

In many books of quotations and on thousands of websites H.L. Mencken is credited with the famous quote “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Most sources fail to mention that this “quote” by “The Sage of Baltimore” is actually the traditional paraphrase of what Mencken actually wrote — not a true quote.

It’s based on something the acerbic journalist, editor and social critic said in his column in the September 18, 1926 edition of Baltimore’s major daily newspaper, The Sun.

Mencken’s column was syndicated and published in many other newspapers after appearing in The Sun. The next day, September 19, 1926, it appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune and other newspapers around the country.

Mencken titled that entry in his column “Notes on Journalism.”

His topic was a recent trend in the American newspaper business: “tabloid newspapers” that were geared toward uneducated readers, including those Mencken described as “near-illiterates.”

Mencken noted that tabloids had several advantages over traditional daily newspapers like The Baltimore Sun.

They were lighter and less bulky than daily newspapers, which had “two or three sections and weigh a pound or more.”

Thus, in addition to being less formal and easier to read than most dailies, tabloids could be “distributed much more quickly than the larger papers.”

“A boy on a motorcycle,” Mencken wrote, “can carry a hundred copies of even the bulkiest of them to a remote junction in ten or twenty minutes, but the old style papers have to go by truck, which is slower.”

In his usual dry way, Mencken also poked fun at the idea that most people wanted the content of newspapers to be more substantive and intellectual than what tabloids typically offered.

He opined that when a tabloid became successful the owner often tried to make it more respectable and “reach out for customers of a higher sophistication.”

Mencken said that was a mistake and, near the end of column, summed up why by writing the words that were later turned into the shorter famous “quote” about underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

His actual words were:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Over time, this longer quote came to be paraphrased and misquoted, most commonly in the form “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

In the column, Mencken continued his thoughts about the public’s choices in reading matter and politicians by adding:

“The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

Looking around at the media and political landscape today, Mencken’s opinion might be deemed more prescient than ever.

Editor’s note: Thanks to reader James C. Morrison Jr. for the note clarifying publication dates of Mencken’s “Notes on Journalism” column!

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The story behind the phrase “The Year of Living Dangerously”

Google has a cool tool for researchers of words and phrases (including quotations) called the Ngram Viewer.

It graphs the occurrence of a word or phrase in books published between the years 1500 and 2008.

If you do an Ngram search for the phrase “the year of living dangerously,” you’ll see a huge, continuing spike starting in the early 1980s.

That’s because it gained major worldwide popularity with the release of the ‘80s film The Year of Living Dangerously.

The movie, directed by Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, first debuted in Australia on December 17, 1982.

It was initially given a limited released in the United States on January 21, 1983, then released nationwide here on February 18, 1983.

The Year of Living Dangerously is one of my own favorite romantic adventure films.

It stars Mel Gibson (back when he was still cool and hot), Sigourney Weaver (who is still cool and hot) and Linda Hunt, in her breakthrough, Oscar-winning role as a man.

Depsite how much I liked it then and now, The Year of Living Dangerously was only a modest hit at the box office. (It grossed a mere $10.3 million during it’s run in U.S. theaters.)

However, the movie’s title became a huge linguistic hit as a catchphrase that has become embedded in our language and spawned many variations.

Indeed, if you Google “the year of living *” -dangerously (using Boolean search techniques to look for versions of the phrase that don’t include the word dangerously), you’ll see thousands of different variations.

A few examples include:

• the title of the best-selling book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible;
• the title of the less pious book A Year of Living Sinfully: A Self-Serving Guide to Doing Whatever the Hell You Want;
• an op-ed by humorist Will Durst that dubbed 2012 “The Year of Living Stupidly.” (Durst noted: “…the only thing that really went right with 2012 was we misread the Mayan Calendar. Everything else is either worse than we found it or the same. Middle East a mess? Check. Crazy people with guns? Check. Weather getting weird? Check. Congress unable to accomplish any sort of worthwhile task, including differentiating between their gluteus maximus and yellow paint? Double check.”); and,
• THE YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, a Showtime documentary series exploring the human impact of climate change.

Although the movie made “the year of living dangerously” a widely-known catchphrase, it’s not the origin.

Nor is the 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch, which the film version is based on.

The setting for the book and movie is Jakarta, Indonesia during the chaotic period that led to the overthrow of the country’s long-time dictator, President Sukarno.

Author Koch took his title from a speech Sukarno made in 1964.

The President had a custom of giving a special name to each year in his annual “National Day” speech.

In the National Day speech he gave on August 17, 1964, Sukarno named the upcoming year “the year of living dangerously.”

This reflected the challenges he knew he faced from his political enemies, who included both hard-line Communists and radical Muslims.

The multilingual leader’s name for the year was based partly on an old Italian phrase he was familiar with — “vivere pericoloso” (“living dangerously”).

Although Sukarno gave the speech in the Indonesian language, he inserted those Italian words after the Indonesian word for year, tahun, to create the name.

The year ahead, he said, would be the “Tahun vivere pericoloso.”

The Google Ngram for “the year of living dangerously” suggests that it first appeared in English-language books around the time Sukarno gave his 1964 National Day address.

Some sources credit him with coining it and, based on what I know at this point, I think he probably did.

Either way, his choice of the name for the coming year certainly turned out to be prophetic.

In September of 1965, a bloody coup began that led to his overthrow.

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were killed in the power struggle. Sukarno survived and was allowed to live out the rest of his days under “house arrest,” until his death in Jakarta on June 21, 1970.

His phrase “the year of living dangerously” and its numerous linguistic offspring live on.

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