John Adams Quotes

The people "have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge- I mean of the character and conduct of their rulers."

The better the information it has, the better democracy works. Silence and secrecy are never good for it.

Without moral and intellectual independence, there is no anchor for national independence.

Golf... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.

Democracy requires that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge to hold the decision-makers accountable.

Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.

The first general duty of princes is carefully to inform themselves of every thing, that falls under the complete discharge of their trust; for a person cannot well acquit himself in that, which he has not first rightly learnt.

Knowledge is the cause as well as the effect of good government

We cannot sustain growth without trained manpower; not our democratic system of government, for freedom is fragile if citizens are ignorant.

When I consider the objections put forward to the grant of self-government I can hardly keep my patience. What is it that they say? They say that we are not educated enough to get self-government. My answer is: whose fault is it? For the last 150 years you have been governing this country and yet you have not succeeded in educating the people of this country to such an extent that they may be fit for governing themselves.

It is the knowledge that all men have weaknesses and that many have vices that makes government necessary.

Any nation that expects to be ignorant and free," Jefferson said, "expects what never was and never will be." And if the gap between the educated and the uneducated in America continues to grow as it is in our time, as fast as or faster than the gap between the rich and the poor, the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to be of greater consequence and the more serious threat to our way of life. We must not, by any means, misunderstand that.

A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free.

Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.

The end of knowledge is wisdom The end of culture is perfection The end of wisdom is freedom The end of education is character. And character consists of eagerness to renounce one's selfish greed.

America is a melting pot, and education has been a mainspring for our democracy and freedom, a means of providing gifts of knowledge and opportunity to all citizens, no matter how humble their background, so they could climb higher, help build the American dream, and leave a better life for those who follow.

For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.

Religion is usually nothing but a supplement to or even a substitute for education, and nothing is religious in the strict sense which is not a product of freedom. Thus one can say: The freer, the more religious; and the more education, the less religion.

The word 'freedom' means for me not a point of departure but a genuine point of arrival. The point of departure is defined by the word 'order.' Freedom cannot exist without the concept of order.

Of course we desire education and we think it is a good thing, but you don't have to have education in order to know that you want certain fundamental rights, you have got aspirations, you have got acclaims. It has nothing to do with education whatsoever.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.

All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.

Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.

Of all the superstitions that affect India, none is so great as that a knowledge of the English language is necessary for imbibing ideas of liberty and developing accuracy to thought.