John Quincy Adams Quotes, US President
This is the last of earth! I am content” John Quincy Adams,
“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty
Fear is the foundation of most governments
Patience and perseverance have a magical affect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish
To respect the rights of the State governments is the inviolable duty of that of the Union; the government of every State will feel its own obligation to respect and preserve the rights of the whole.
Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide
Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity.
Where annual elections end where slavery begins.
“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
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.
In politics the middle way is none at all.
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government whith the principles of Christianity.
From the day of the Declaration…they (the American people) were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of The Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct.
— John Quincy Adams
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
— John Quincy Adams
“So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society.”
— John Quincy Adams
“I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.”
— John Quincy Adams
The Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth [and] laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity.
— John Quincy Adams
“I speak as a man of the world to men of the world and I say to you, search the scriptures, the Bible is the book of all others to be read at all ages and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day and never to be intermitted unless by some overruling necessity.”
— John Quincy Adams
The pretence of an absolute, irresistible, despotic power, existing in every government somewhere, is incompatible with the first principle of natural right. Take for example the right to life. The moment an infant is born, it has a right to the life which it has received from the Creator . . . no human being, no combination of human beings, has the power, I say not the physical, but the moral power, to take a life not so forfeited [by commission of a crime], unless in self-defense or by the laws of war .
–John Quincy Adams
Duty is ours; results are God’s. The first and almost the only Book deserving of universal attention is the Bible. In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.