• “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation.” ~John Adams, in letter to Thomas Jefferson
  

• “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” ~John Adams (1770)
  

• “National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman.” ~John Adams (1815)
  

• “Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for Liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of Truth and a veneration of Virtue. … If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” ~John Adams (1775)
  

• “Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for Liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of Truth and a veneration of Virtue. … If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?” ~John Adams (1775)
  

• “There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honour, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superiour to all private passions.” ~John Adams (1776)
  

• “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” ~John Adams
  

• “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” ~John Adams
  

• “It is vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. . . . Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.” ~John Adams
  

• “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” ~John Adams, (1789)