John Quincy Adams Quotes

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

Try and fail,but don't fail to try.

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.

Whoever tells the best story wins.

I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.

America... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

The Sermon on the Mount commands me to lay up for myself treasures, not upon earth, but in Heaven. My hopes of a future life are all founded upon the Gospel of Christ.

I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.

I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.

All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

The freedom of the press should be inviolate.

The art of making love, muffled up in furs, in the open air, with the thermometer at Zero, is a Yankee invention.

Duty is ours, results are God's.

[I believe in the] rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.

Our Constitution rests on the good sense and the respect of the American people.

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

America is a friend of freedom everywhere, but a custodian only of our own.

I would much rather be found guilty of making a serious mistake in judgment, than to be accused of being even a little bit insincere.

Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.

From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future.

Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is practicable in a nation or not.

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

His face is livid, gaunt his whole body, his breath is green with gall; his tongue drips poison.

Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls.

The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God. It contains the history of the creation of the world, and of mankind.

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.

No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible.

All that I am my mother made me.

Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel.

We understand now, we've been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

The four most miserable years of my life were my four years in the presidency.

Those who take oaths to politically powerful secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.

There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.

Every temptation is an opportunity of our getting nearer to God.

May our country be always successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.

The Bible carries with it the history of the creation, the fall and redemption of man, and discloses to him, in the infant born at Bethlehem, the Legislator and Savior of the world.

In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.

The hope of a Christian is inseparable from his faith. Whoever believes in the Divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures must hope that the religion of Jesus shall prevail throughout the earth.

The will of the people is the source and the happiness of the people the end of all legitimate government upon earth.

Individual liberty is individual power.

The Law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code.

I told him that I thought it was law logic - an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in Courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.

I say women exhibit the most exalted virtue when they depart from the domestic circle and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their G-d!

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benedictions and her prayers.

Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Saviour?