John Adams Quotes

In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.

~ John Adams

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.

~ John Adams

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.

~ John Adams

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

~ John Adams

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

~ John Adams

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

~ 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

The happiness of society is the end of government.

~ John Adams

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.

~ John Adams

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

~ John Adams

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

~ 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

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

~ John Adams

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.

~ John Adams

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.

~ John Adams

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

~ John Adams

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

~ John Adams

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

~ John Adams

I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown, others to eat the bread which I have earned. A common case.

~ John Adams

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

~ 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

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.

~ John Adams

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

~ John Adams

In politics the middle way is none at all.

~ 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

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

~ John Adams

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.

~ John Adams