John Adams Quotes

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute...

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.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

The jaws of power are always opened to devour.

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right…and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

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 politics the middle way is none at all.

A government of laws, and not of men.

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.

The law, in all vicissitudes of government…will preserve a steady undeviating course…On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.

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