Some Adams Family Quotes

From the book John Adams by David McCullough, the one turned into an HBO mini-series:

Writing to John Adams on his way to the Continental Congress...

"You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator....We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them."    ~Abigail Adams

Writing to Benjamin Rush's son Richard (AG at the time) on America's place in the world in 1815...

"We must learn to know ourselves, to esteem ourselves, to respect ourselves." ~John Adams

Reading in Rousseau that...

"There is no doubt that people are in the long run what the government make out of them...," Adams wrote "The government ought to be what the people make it."

Reading the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft, John Adams responds to her claim that government must be simple

"The clock would be simple if you destroyed all the wheels...but it would not tell the time of day."

Writing in corresondence with Mordecai Noah, a noted New York editor, after Mr. Noah sent him a discourse delivered at the consecraton of a synagogue in New York...

"You have not extended your ideas of the right of private judgement and the liberty of conscience both in religion and philosophy farther than I do. I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.
      I wish your nation to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens in every country in the world. This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce." ~John Adams

Writing to John Adams after he was appointed, at the age of eighty-five, to the Massachusetts state convention to revise its constitution that Adams had helped write 40 years earlier Thomas Jefferson "rejoiced" that Adams was to take part in such an effort in the "advance of liberalism."

In John Adams last letter to Thomas Jefferson, talking about the rough treatment his son John Quincy Adams was receiving from an uncivil Congress...

"Our American chivalry is the worst in all the world. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions; it seems to be a caprice."