John Adams Quotes

If I had refused to institute a negotiation or had not persevered in it I would have been degraded in my own estimation as a man of honor.

Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams

Swim or sink live or die survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.

The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)

Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

A government of laws, and not of men.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

Had I been chosen president again I am certain I could not have lived another year.

The four most miserable years of my life . . .

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.

In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.

player: Can I reach it with a five iron? caddie: Eventually.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.

Old minds are like old horses you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

Its never to late to get back on your feet though we wont live forever make sure you accomplish what you were put here for

I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

Every man in it is a great man an orator a critic a statesman and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory his criticism and his political abilities.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

Remove yourself, sir!

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

A government of laws, and not of men

Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that... and all the glory of it.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .

He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.

Knowledge in the head and virtue in the heart, time devoted to study or business, instead of show and pleasure, are the way to be useful and consequently happy.

Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.