More than any other figure in our history [Tomas] Jefferson is responsible for the idea of American exceptionalism.

Again and again [Tomas] Jefferson deftly sidesteps many of [John] Adams's often provocative remarks. They both felt the correspondence, which was written for posterity, was too important to risk by being too candid with one another.

This rationale, which justified the mixed constitution of Great Britain, might have made some sense in 1776, but by 1787 most American thinkers had come to believe that all parts of their balanced governments represented in one way or another the sovereign people. They had left the Aristotelian idea of mixed estates - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy - way behind. [John] Adams had not, and his stubbornness on this point caused him no end of trouble.

[John] Adams was arguing that a separate social order existed that needed to be embodied in senates and his fellow Americans could not accept this and accused him rightly of being obsessed with the English constitution.

[John Adams] is impressed with [Tomas] Jefferson's learning, but noted his silence during the debates in the Congress: "I never heard him utter three Sentences together."

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