John Adams Quotes

As long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. As long as Marriage exists, Knowledge, Property and Influence will accumulate in Families.

I consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for public service.

Genius is sorrow's child.

The happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. And you can write ten times better than I can.

The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion.

I Pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessing on this house, and on ALL that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof!

The universal object and idol of men of letters is reputation.

The balance of power in a society accompanies the balance of property in land.

They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.

The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty, when they have been in competition.

If we take a survey of the greatest actions...in the world...we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons whose Brains had been shaken out of their natural position.

To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.

I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.

The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.

Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart

There is no greater guilt than the unneccessary war.

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

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

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

Thanks be to God, that he gave me Stubborness, when I know I am right.

Everything in life should be done with reflection.

Make Things rather than Persons the subjects of conversations.

The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.

The study and practice of law ... does not dissolve the obligations of morality or of religion.

It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.

Have you ever found in history, one single example of a nation, thoroughly corrupted, that was afterwards restored to virtue? And without virtue there can be no political liberty.

Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.

I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.

Slavery is a foul contagion in the human character.

The real fabric of American society is not all those flags you see on people's cars...it's in the Bill of Rights and in our constitutional form of government.

Power in any Form . . . when directed only by human Wisdom and Benevolence is dangerous.

I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits... Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.

Where annual elections end, there slavery begins ... Humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.

In general, our generals were outgeneralled.

It's of more importance to community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished

All great changes are irksome to the human mind, especially those which are attended with great dangers and uncertain effects.

What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?

Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.

There is not an enemy so stout, as to storm and take the fortress of the mind, Unless its infirmity turn traitor, and Fear unbar the gates.

The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.

National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman, and that there is an obligation to perform such a duty absolutely irrespective of party politics or factional differences.

Borrowed eloquence, if it contains as good stuff, is as good as own eloquence

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

Public business must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise man decline, others will not; if honest man refuse it, others will not.

Virtue is not always amiable.

No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'

I am for making of terms annual, and for sending an entire new set every year.

They shall not be expected to acknowledge us until we have acknowledged ourselves.

We are in the the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.