John Adams Quotes

“Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.”

“Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.”

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

“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.”

“The prospect is chilling, on every Side. Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting. When and where will the light spring up?”

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

“Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.”

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

“Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.”

“I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough.... The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.”

“The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.”

“While all other Sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”

“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”

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

“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

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

“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.”

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”

“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.”

“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.”