It was [John's Adams] Massachusetts constitution if anything that influenced people.

[John] Adams was the best and most colorful stylist among the Founders. Although [Tomas] Jefferson is widely regarded as the smoothest writer, Adams is by far the most engaging and imaginative.

[John's Adams] description of [Benjamin] Franklin in a letter to [his wife] Abigail in 1775 is laudatory. Only when he experiences all the adulation paid to Franklin in Paris does he begin to change his tune.

[John] Adams never hid his jealousy and resentment of the other Founders, especially Benjamin Franklin.

[John Adams' writings] had indicted the United States for slavishly copying the English constitution by erecting bicameral legislatures in their state constitutions, most drafted in 1776.

[Benjamin] Franklin may be a great philosopher, [John Adams] told his diary in 1779, but "as a Legislator in America he has done very little."

I think [John Adams] developed a much deeper suspicion of France and the other European powers than he had earlier. He lost much if not all of the utopian thinking about international politics and diplomacy expressed in his Model Treaty of 1776 and became much more cynical about the world.