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John Adams Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes

Browse quotations by John Adams with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.

Sources

All 3 works represented in this collection

Adams’ Argument for the Defense: Boston Massacre Trials1770 · 1 quotation
Inaugural Address, 4 March 17971797 · 1 quotation
Thoughts on Government, April 17761776 · 1 quotation
Leading recurring themes
Short 1Integrity 2Leadership 1Truth 1Thought Provoking 3Politics 2Power 2Community 1Decision 1Democracy 1Honesty 1Justice 1
Source identified1
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
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“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Adams’ Argument for the Defense: Boston Massacre Trials · 1770
Meaning & context

Adams argues that judgment in a legal case should follow evidence even when emotion, public pressure or personal wishes point toward a preferred conclusion.

Source details

Closing defense argument in the Boston Massacre soldiers’ trial, December 1770, preserved by Founders Online. The line belongs to courtroom advocacy about evidence and due process in a specific criminal proceeding.

Source identified2
the Government may be the Choice of a Party, for its own Ends, not of the nation for the national good.
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“the Government may be the Choice of a Party, for its own Ends, not of the nation for the national good.”

Inaugural Address, 4 March 1797 · 1797
Meaning & context

Adams warns that corruption or manipulation of elections can substitute factional interest for the public choice an elected government is supposed to represent.

Source details

Inaugural Address, March 4, 1797, represented by Founders Online / National Archives. The clause appears in Adams’s warning about party artifice, corruption and foreign interference in elections; it remains historical presidential rhetoric rather than current election-law advice.

Source identified3
The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people.
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“The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people.”

Thoughts on Government, April 1776 · 1776
Meaning & context

Adams connects durable political institutions with the habits and motivations prevailing among the people who sustain them.

Source details

Thoughts on Government, April 1776, represented by Founders Online / National Archives. Adams develops an eighteenth-century republican theory of government grounded in public virtue; the sentence is historical political philosophy, not a modern empirical law.