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Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.

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
Unlimited
Cruel
Libertarian
Discover
Majorities
Majority
Unbridled
Mankind
Tyrannical
Liberty
Despots
Time
Libertarianism

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One useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three is a Congress.
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The deliberate union of so great and various a people in such a place, is without all partiality or prejudice, if not the greatest exertion of human understanding, the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen.
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Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public.
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If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
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You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.
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Human passions unbridled by morality and religion...would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.
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A single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies, and frailties of an individual subject to fits of humor, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities, or prejudice, and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments. And all these errors ought to be corrected and defects supplied by some controlling power.
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Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.
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There is nothing I dread so much as the 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.
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Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
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Borrowed eloquence, if it contains as good stuff, is as good as own eloquence
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The only thing most people do better than anyone else is read their own handwriting.
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Where annual elections end, there slavery begins ... Humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.
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If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will have the balance of power, and in that case the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude in all acts of government.
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During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.
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My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
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Historically, usury was defined as any interest whatever on an unproductive loan.Our whole banking system I have ever abhorred, I continue to abhor, and I shall die abhorring.
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As the safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him.
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Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would.
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Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.
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