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Quotes by John Adams


"Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write." -John Adams


John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
 
Contributed by: MagnumVox. More quotes added by MagnumVox from all sources
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If there is ever an amelioration of the condition of mankind, philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult, dangerous and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind cannot now be governed without it, nor at present with it.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: Letter to James Lord, February 11, 1815.
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Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: To J. H. Tiffany, March 31, 1819.
More quotes about: abuse, society, words
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My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
 
More quotes about: country, imagination, inventions
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The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. . . . And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: Letter to John Taylor, The Life and Works of John Adams, Boston, 1851, v. 6, p. 517.
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Mr. Adams, describing a conversation with Jonathan Sewall in 1774, says: "I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination."

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: Webster's Works, vol. iv. p. 8.
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I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: On the Abuses of Grief. Letter to Jefferson, in Jefferson's Works, Vol. VII,
More quotes about: abuse, grief, history, mankind, thought
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I request that they may be considered in confidence, until the members of Congress are fully possessed of their contents, and shall have had opportunity to deliberate on the consequences of their publication; after which time, I submit them to your wisdom.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: message to both houses of Congress transmitting dispatches from France, April 3, 1798.—The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 9, p. 158 (1854).
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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 : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
 
More quotes about: existence, freedom, hope, laughter, people, thinking, writing
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Set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests; in short against the gates of earth and hell.

John Adams : American statesman (2nd US president: 1797-1801)
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
Source: Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, 1765.
More quotes about: ancestry, cruelty, earth, hell, mankind
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