Category: Thought

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.

Abigail Adams, Letter to John Quincy Adams (May 8, 1780).

Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.

John Quincy Adams, Letter to James Lloyd (October 1, 1822).

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate.

Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter One: “Quincy” (1907).

Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883). Frederick Waddy, illustrator.

There is one principle which pervades all the institutions of this country, and which must always operate as an obstacle to the granting of favors to new comers. This is a land, not of privileges, but of equal rights.

John Quincy Adams, Letter written as Secretary of State under President James Monroe (1819).

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.

Abigail Adams, Letter to John Quincy Adams (19 January 1780).

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

Thomas Paine, “The Forester’s Letters,” Letter III—‘To Cato,’ Pennsylvania Journal (April 24, 1776).

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869).

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 1.

It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (1869). Frederick Waddy, illustrator.