Adams, John (1735 – 1826), US diplomat & politician
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress.
The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.
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.
All the perplexities, confusions, and distress in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honour or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.
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.
