Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.

Let your observations and comparisons produce in your mind an abhorrence of domination and power, the parent of slavery, ignorance, and barbarism, which places man upon a level with his fellow tenants of the woods.

Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex.

A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards Men?

When he is wounded, I bleed. {page 262 of John Adams}