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John Adams
Motives
"What has preserved this race of Adamses in all their ramifications in such numbers, health, peace, comfort, and mediocrity?
"I belive it is religion, without which they would have been rakes, fops, sots, gamblers, starved with hunger, or frozen with cold, scalped by Indians, etc., etc., etc., been melted away and disappeared...."
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Adams Papers, MA Historical Society
Business connections
"If there is one central truth to be collected from the history of all
ages, it is this: that the people's rights and liberties, and the demo-
cratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a
strong executive, or, in other words, without separating the executive
from the legislative power.
If the executive power, or any considerable
part of it, is left in the hands of an aristocratical or
democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature as necessarily
as rust corrupts iron, or as arsenic poisons the human body; and
when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone."
Tyranny
"Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power."
A Defence of the Constitutions
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