Samuel Adams Quotes

I believe that it is an unchanging value of democracy that ends cannot justify the means in politics.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The law expresses the values and aspirations of our society.

The law exists to express our values.

Justice is the great interest of man on earth.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

There is nothing politically right that is morally wrong.

Even in this glowering age, morality animates our lives with meaning.

Liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is liberty to that which is good, just, and honest.

Law alone cannot make men see right.

The cause of France is identical with that of Righteousness.

… freemen contending in the most righteous cause.

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

Without Virtue there can be no liberty

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of humanity.

Liberty is the parent of truth, but truth and decency are sometimes at variance. All men and all propositions are to be treated here as they deserve, and there are many who have no claim either to respect or decency.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.

I believe in justice and truth, without which there would be no basis for human hope

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

The industrial and social injustice of our era is the tragic aftermath of democracy's overemphasis on freedom as the "right to do whatever you please." No, freedom means the right to do what you ought, and ought implies law, and law implies justice, and justice implies God. So too in war, a nation that fights for freedom divorced from justice has no right to war, because it does not know why it wants to be free, or why it wants anyone else to be free.