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To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.

John Adams

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John Adams
Age: 90 †
Born: 1735
Born: October 19
Died: 1826
Died: July 4
2Nd U.S. President
Diplomat
Lawyer
Political Philosopher
Politician
Statesperson
Braintree
Massachusetts
President Adams
J. Adams
President John Adams
Folly
Worse
None
Honest
Virtue
Something
Believe
Men
Humankind

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A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.
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Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence.
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Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude. I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory, and heartily wish that every Constitutional measure may be adopted for the preservation of it.
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Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.
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Riches attract attention, consideration, and congratulations of mankind.
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I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.
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Had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.
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Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.
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I am quite content to come home and go to Farming, be a select Man, and owe no Man any Thing but good Will. There I can get a little health and teach my Boys to be Lawyers.
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[I] never understood [what a republican government was and] I believe no other man ever did or ever will.
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The essence of a free government consists in an effectual control of rivalries.
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The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly an aristocratic council or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.
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The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity.
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This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
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The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to prevent their growth in our own.
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I drink no cider, but feast on Philadelphia beer.
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No good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'
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Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public.
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One sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.
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I had heard my father say that he never knew a piece of land run away or break.
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