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Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it.

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
Vice
Folly
Vanity
Vices
Cardinal
Danger
Cardinals
Company
Continual
Chase
Sensible

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I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
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I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
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Oh! the wisdom, the foresight and the hindsight and the rightsight and the leftsight, the northsight and the southsight, and the eastsight and the westsight that appeared in that august assembly.
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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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Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense.
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Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact.
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I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.
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While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.
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To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.
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They shall not be expected to acknowledge us until we have acknowledged ourselves.
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We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands we have a check upon two branches of the legislature.
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If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information and benevolence.
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When I was young, and addicted to reading, I had heard about dancing on the points of metaphysical needles but, by mixing in the world, I found the points of political needles finer and sharper than the metaphysical ones.
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The universal object and idol of men of letters is reputation.
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I shall have the liberty to think for myself.
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There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation...is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral...that it is a duty and a virtue.
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Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.
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Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.
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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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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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