John Adams quotes
Born
October 30, 1735 Braintree, Province of Massachusetts Bay, British America.
Died
July 4, 1826.
Occupation
President, lawyer, diplomat, politician.
John Adams was an American statesman and Founding Father who served as the first Vice President (1789–97) and second President of the United States (1797–1801). He was a lawyer, diplomat, political theorist, and a leader of the movement for American independence from Great Britain.
Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.
– John Adams
My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
– John Adams
As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.
– John Adams
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
– John Adams
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
– John Adams
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
– John Adams
Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.
– John Adams
Power always thinks… that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.
– John Adams
Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
– John Adams
A government of laws, and not of men.
– John Adams
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
– John Adams
Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
– John Adams
Genius is sorrow’s child.
– John Adams
In politics the middle way is none at all.
– John Adams
A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.
– John Adams
The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.
– John Adams
Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.
– John Adams
Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
– John Adams
The happiness of society is the end of government.
– John Adams
Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.
– John Adams
The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.
– John Adams