John Adams was an American statesman, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding Father who served as the second president of the United States, from 1797 to 1801. Before his presidency, he was a leader of the American Revolution that achieved independence from Great Britain, and he served as the first vice president of the United States. Adams was a dedicated diarist and regularly corresponded with many important figures in early American history, including his wife and adviser Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. These John Adams quotes will motivate you to achieve success in life.
Best John Adams Quotes
- “One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three is a Congress.” ~ 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
- “We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.” ~ John Adams
- “There is nothing I dread so much as the 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.” ~ John Adams
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“Always stand on principle even if you stand alone.” ~ John Adams
- “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.” ~ John Adams
- “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” ~ John Adams , John Adams quotes on leaders
- “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a country. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” ~ John Adams
- “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” ~ John Adams
- “Power always thinks… that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.” ~ John Adams
- “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” ~ John Adams
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“Those who trade liberty for security have neither.” ~ John Adams
- “When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny.” ~ John Adams
- “…Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrendered their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.” ~ John Adams
- “When legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.” ~ John Adams
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“We have no Constitution which functions in the absence of a moral people” ~ John Adams
- “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.” ~ John Adams , John Adams quotes on reliogion
- “Be not intimidated… nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.” ~ John Adams
- “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” ~ John Adams
- “Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.” ~ John Adams
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“Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” ~ John Adams
- “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.” ~ John Adams
- “Power must never be trusted without a check.” ~ John Adams
- “Ideology is the science of idiots.” ~ John Adams
- “Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.” ~ John Adams
- “The most sensible and jealous people are so little attentive to government that there are no instances of resistance until repeated, multiplied oppressions have placed it beyond a doubt that their rulers had formed settled plans to deprive them of their liberties; not to oppress an individual or a few, but to break down the fences of a free constitution, and deprive the people at large of all share in the government, and all the checks by which it is limited.” ~ John Adams
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“A government of laws, and not of men.” ~ John Adams
- “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know…Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly [with your God]. This is enough.” ~ John Adams
- “The Declaration of Independence laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.” ~ 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
- “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.” ~ John Adams , John Adams quotes on political parties
- “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the 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, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)” ~ John Adams
- “As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselman [Muslims] … it is declared … that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries…. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.” ~ John Adams
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“To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.” ~ John Adams
- “As the happiness of the people is the sole end of government, so the consent of the people is the only foundation of it.” ~ John Adams
- “[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.” ~ John Adams
- “Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.” ~ John Adams
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“We Recognize No Sovereign but God, and no King but Jesus!” ~ John Adams
- “Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.” ~ John Adams
- “[L]iberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.” ~ John Adams
- “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.” ~ John Adams
- “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: nor is the law less stable than the fact.” ~ 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
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“My God! This is a revolution! We have to offend someone!” ~ John Adams
- “The destiny of America is to carry the gospel of Jesus Christ to all men everywhere.” ~ John Adams
- “Our whole system of banks is a violation of every honest principle of banks. There is no honest bank but a bank of deposit. A bank that issues paper at interest is a pickpocket or a robber. But the delusion will have its course. … An aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons if unchecked in time.” ~ John Adams
- “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle” ~ John Adams
- “Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.” ~ John Adams
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“Fear is the foundation of most governments.” ~ John Adams
- “An honest, sensible, humane man, . . . laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity . . . is really the most respectable man in society, [and] makes himself and all about him most happy.” ~ John Adams
- “The date will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.” ~ John Adams
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“Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion… in private self-defense.” ~ John Adams
- “It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.” ~ John Adams Quotes
- “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one-mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.” ~ John Adams
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“He is too illiterate, unread, unlearned for his station and reputation.” ~ John Adams
- “We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls.” ~ John Adams
- “The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.” ~ John Adams
- “Here, every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defense, not for offense.” ~ John Adams Quotes
- “In every society where property exists, there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor. Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected; they will either be made by the member to plunder the few who are rich or by the influence to fleece the many who are poor.” ~ John Adams
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“People and nations are forged in the fires of adversity.” ~ John Adams
- “That the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of the history of the world.” ~ John Adams
- “And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know. But besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.” ~ John Adams
- “We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.” ~ John Adams
- “When public virtue is gone, when the national spirit is fled the republic is lost in essence, though it may still exist in form” ~ John Adams
- “Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.” ~ John Adams
