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.

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

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

I read my eyes out and can't read half enough...the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.

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.

Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.

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.

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.

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.