John Adams Quotes
John Adams Quotes
Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend.
3256 You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
2256 Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .
3626 I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
4148 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.
2209 There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation...is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral...that it is a duty and a virtue.
1415 Nineteen twentieths of [mankind is] opaque and unenlightened. Intimacy with most people will make you acquainted with vices and errors and follies enough to make you despise them.
2075 We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.
2803 There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
2088 A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
2491 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.
2706 Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
3191 All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
1229 Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
4159 When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:
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.
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