Samuel Adams Quotes

Wrong people are wrong because they use their freedom to deny it to others.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.

A heavy aristocracy and corruption are two bridles in the mouths of a people which will prevent them from making any effectual efforts against their masters.

Coalitions are but the unjust subjection of one people to another.

There is something wrong in a government where they who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.

Ask of politicians the end for which laws were originally designed, and they will answer that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak against the oppression of the rich and powerful. But surely no pretense can be so ridiculous

The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion

...and for that they were rich,/And robbed the poor; and for that they were strong,/And scourged the weak; and for that they made laws/Which turned the sweat of labor's brow to blood! - /For these their sins the nations cast them out.

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

The organization and constant onward sweep of this movement exemplifies the resentment of the many toward the selfishness, greed and the neglect of the few.

So the people will pay the penalty for their kings' presumption, who, by devising evil, turn justice from her path with tortuous speech.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

The masses don't shed their blood for the benefit of a few individuals.

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury.

By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.

You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?

What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?