Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavis...
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. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half th...
Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.
I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown, others to eat the bread which I have...
Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, '...
The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.
The four most miserable years of my life . . .
Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.
I must not write a word to you about politics, because you are a woman.
Had I been chosen president again I am certain I could not have lived another year.
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
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 infl...
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
A government of laws, and not of men.
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...
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.
Fear is the foundation of most governments.
My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
In esse I am nothing in posse I am everything.