John Adams

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Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination—everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

John Adams (1735-1826), U.S. statesman, president. letter, Oct. 9, 1774, to his wife, Abigail Adams.

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.

John Adams (1735-1826), U.S. statesman, president. Notes for A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765).

A government of laws, and not of men.

John Adams (1735-1826), U.S. statesman, president. The Works of John Adams, vol. 4, ed. Charles Francis Adams (1851). Novanglus Papers, Boston Gazette, no. 7 (1774). This phrase, taken from one of the articles published in the Boston Gazette, was attributed by Adams to English political theorist and republican, James Harrington (1611- 1677), whose actual words were, "the empire of laws and not of men" (Oceana, 1656). The words were incorporated by Adams into the Massachusetts Constitution (1780).

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