Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good, but never assume to comprehend.
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .
I read my eyes out and can’t read half enough…the more one reads the more one sees we have to read.
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
Politeness, delicacy [and] decency … are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
Knowledge in the head and virtue in the heart, time devoted to study or business, instead of show and pleasure, are the way to be useful and consequently happy.
Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude and I am utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territories.
…Defeat appears to me preferable to total Inaction.
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.
He wrote as a young man that God’s noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.
The true source of our sufferings has been our timidity.
Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind.
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
Be not intimidated…nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.