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All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

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More quotes by John Adams

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

There is, in the human Breast, a social Affection, which extends to our whole Species.

Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.

Letter to Robert J. Evans (1819)

The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.

Discourses on Davila (1790)

Tyranny can scarcely be practised upon a virtuous and wise people.

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Adams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.