Lafayette, we are here!
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Spoken at the tomb of Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, Paris (4 July 1917), as quoted in John H. George and Paul Boller, They Never Said It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 104; the quote is often misattributed to John J. Pershing.Charles E. Stanton
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Lafayette avoided the factions jealous of Washington because he recognized that Washington was the Revolution and that should he be reduced in power or replaced, the whole cause would collapse. ... Washington was a shrewd judge of character and never would have warmed to Lafayette if he had been only a superficial ingratiating romantic.
Lafayette scrupulously looked after his men, spending his own money when Congress failed to provide them necessities. Nor was he backward in suggesting to Washington certain changes and innovations from French military practice.Gilbert du Motier Lafayette
Lafayette is a young man of royal birth, with liberal politics and what Jefferson later called "a canine appetite for fame." Someone said he was "a statue in search of a pedestal." But he was intoxicated with, [had] a rather theoretical love of, liberty. It was theoretical because liberty wasn't known to many Europeans. [Lafayette] was a great romantic and he fell in love with America, the concept of America that the French had. This wild new world where you could start the world over, to use Tom Paine's phrase.
Gilbert du Motier Lafayette
Lafayette, nous voil?!
Gilbert du Motier Lafayette
When the principle of hereditary dominion shall be extinguished in all the institutions of France; when government shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to son, but as a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return to the people whence it came ; as a burdensome duty to be discharged, and not as a reward to be abused; when a claim, any claim, to political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the wholfl French people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North American Union — then will be the time for contemplating the character of Lafayette, not merely in the events of his life, but in the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and eventful career upon earth; and thenceforward, till the hour when the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.
John Quincy Adams
Till the hour when the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.
Gilbert du Motier Lafayette
Stanton, Charles E.
Stanwyck, Barbara
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