John Quincy Adams Quotes

“Adams had no doubt that education was as much a human birthright as freedom, for females as well as males, for slaves as well as free blacks. Freedom and education were inseparable.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“We are sent into this world for some end. It is our duty to discover by close study what this end is and when we once discover it to pursue it”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“Admiral Stephen Decatur’s widely publicized toast in 1816, “our country, right or wrong,” struck Adams as not only discordant but immoral.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“Adams’ attitude toward employees exemplified the New England view defining people mostly by performance. Class was accidental, a matter of birth and category. Performance was individual, partly under the control of character. He was interested in people of every class. Steerage and cabin passengers mingled in a twice-a-week political discussion group in which he took part. When”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“On the rights of women, he found Löwenhielm and Bielfeld agreed with him that “it is in vain to labor . . . against the prescriptions of Nature. Political subserviency and domestic influence must be the lot of women, and those who have departed the most from their natural sphere are not those who have shown the sex in their most amiable light.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“What he had no disagreement about with either former president was that political parties were instruments of bad governance; they were manifestations of individual or group self-interest that would undermine republican government.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“This is the weakness of my nature, which I have intellect enough left to perceive, but not energy to control. . . . The world will retire from me before I shall retire from the world.” If”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“In a long essay of about thirty thousand words, analyzing the philosophical and political underpinnings of the conflict, Adams surveyed the full range and implications of the tariff, the nullification controversy, and other administration policies: the end of a federal role in internal improvements; the elimination of the public lands as a source of revenue; the termination of the national bank; the refusal of fair protection for industry; the twisting and evasion of the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; the preference for slave rather than free labor; and the privileging of those engaged in agriculture as an expression of the belief that the country was divided into superior and inferior people by occupation, geography, and birth. This “is the fundamental axiom of all landed aristocracies . . . holding in oppressive servitude the real cultivators of the soil, and ruling, with a hand of iron, over all the other occupations and professions of men. . . . The assumption of such a principle . . . for the future government of these United States, is an occurrence of the most dangerous and alarming tendency; as threatening . . . not only the prosperity but the peace of the country, and as directly leading to the most fatal of catastrophes—the dissolution of the Union by a complicated, civil, and servile war.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“His vision represented everything they detested. It would make government a player in their everyday lives by creating a transportation infrastructure, regulating financial institutions, and supporting education and research.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“He had no doubt that the country actually wanted internal improvements. But he knew that it did not want to pay for them, especially if this meant that Western land would not be sold cheaply, that there might be internal taxes, and that the revenue of the federal government would be increased. It also did not want to acknowledge openly, as Adams’ grand statements did, its desire for internal improvements, let alone the benefits of federal spending to local communities. Rational planning frightened those for whom big government was the ultimate evil. Many valued individualism and unregulated entrepreneurship more than social community and beneficial regulation. The American spirit, particularly in the West, contained a hefty dose of creative anarchy: the landscape existed to be turned into cash through planting, grazing, logging, mining, and hunting, at whatever cost to the earth and future generations. What the country would in the long run benefit from most, Adams proposed, was some constructive balance between individual enterprise and communal action. Government leadership and rational planning were, he believed, compatible with capitalism and private property. And the divisive issues that threatened the stability of the country could be resolved only by stronger bonds of union. Union provided security and prosperity. The most effective agents of union were public improvements. Better to go down fighting for a stronger future than to serve a second term at the cost of forfeiting the opportunities for leadership that the presidency provided. There was the long-term future to consider, and the leadership that was unsuccessful today might sow the ground for successes tomorrow.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“You and I are competent . . . to hold opinions, but not to obtain perfect knowledge.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“A decade younger than Adams, Clay had served in the Senate and House, twice as speaker. A mercurial personality and gifted orator, he was an idealistic patriot with an immense ego. Like Bayard, he had little intellectual curiosity and the politician’s gift of not seeing the slightest gap between his own ambition and his country’s well-being.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“natural right of the individual to personal freedom overrode man-made laws.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“The conduct of men,” John Adams noted, “is much more governed by their passions than by their interests;”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“Parents owed their children admonition and discipline, not expressive sentiment.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“that freedom is the prize Man still is bound to rescue or maintain; That nature’s God commands the slave to rise, And on the oppressor’s head to break his chain. Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, Till not a slave shall on this earth be found!”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. My toast would be, may our country be always successful, but whether successful or otherwise always right. I disclaim as unsound all patriotism incompatible with the principles of eternal justice.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary