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Quotes about America

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I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than the means.
John Adams1735–1826Letter to Abigail Adams (3 July 1776), published in The Adams Papers: Adams Family Correspondence (2007) edited by Margaret A. Hogan
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams1735–1826Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6
You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.
John Adams1735–1826
- Presidency
Had I been chosen President again, I am certain I could not have lived another year.
John Adams1735–1826
- Presidency
I pray Heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.
John Adams1735–1826On the White House, in a letter to Abigail Adams (2 November 1800)
- Prayer
- Presidency
I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.
John Adams1735–1826To an ambassador (1785), as quoted in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: Autobiography (1851), by Charles F. Adams, p. 392.
- Patriotism
I shudder when I think of the calamities which slavery is likely to produce in this country.
John Adams1735–1826Letter to Louisa Catherine Adams (13 January 1820)
- Slavery
The Constitution shall never be construed…to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
Samuel Adams1722–1803
The country shall be independent, and we will be satisfied with nothing short of it.
Samuel Adams1722–1803Remark in “small confidential companies”; in William Gordon, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, vol. 1 (1788, reprinted 1969), entry for March 9, 1774, p. 347.
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams1722–1803The Rights of the Colonists (1772)
Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last resort.
Samuel Adams1722–1803Speech in Philadelphia (1776)
The government at Washington does live. It lives in the pages of our Constitution and in the hearts of our citizens, and there it will always be safe.
Spiro Agnew1918–1996
In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress!
Ethan Allen1738–1789A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), on demanding the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga (10 May 1775)
- War & Peace
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union… Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.
Susan B. Anthony1820–1906
The women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
Susan B. Anthony1820–1906