John Quincy Adams Quotes

"Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day [the Fourth of July]?" "Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior? That it forms a leading event in the progress of the Gospel dispensation? Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity"? --1837, at the age of 69, when he delivered a Fourth of July speech at Newburyport, Massachusetts.

"The Law given from Sinai [The Ten Commandments] was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code." John Quincy Adams. Letters to his son. p. 61

The church polity [form of government] of New England begat like principles in the state. The pew and the pulpit had been educated to self-government. They were accustomed "TO CONSIDER." The highest glory of the American Revolution, said John Quincy Adams, was this: it connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. John Wingate Thornton, The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston: Gould And Lincoln, 1860), p. xxix.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. John Quincy Adams

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

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. John Quincy Adams

Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel. John Quincy Adams

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. John Quincy Adams

The declaration that our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult. John Quincy Adams

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. John Quincy Adams

In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue. John Quincy Adams

So great is my veneration for the Bible, that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hopes that they will prove useful citizens to their country and respectable members of society. John Quincy Adams

I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity.

The complexity of God’s Way understood in a single diagram

Obey your flesh and descend into darkness

How can we know anything about anything? That’s the real question

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