John Adams Quotes

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.

Sadly, the truth is, there aren't many people who can be put in high positions who won't start thinking highly of themselves.

Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.

We think we know what's right. With excessive pride comes blindness.

I consider myself to be a man of principle. But, what man does not? Even the cutthroat, I have noticed, considers his actions "moral" after a fashion. Perhaps another person, reading of my life, would name me a religious tyrant. He could call me arrogant. What is to make that man's opinion any less valid than my own? I guess it all comes down to one fact: In the end, I'm the one with the armies.

As God as my witness, they said, We're above the law. There's nothing you can do to us. You're just a church secretary.

One thing I hope I'll never be is drunk with my own power. And anybody who says I am will never work in this town again.

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence

Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-informed as they are.

Those that know the least of others think the highest of themselves.

Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.

Tolerance is love sick with the sickness of haughtiness.

Keep in mind, Eragon, that no one thinks himself a villain, and few make decisions they think are wrong. A person may dislike his choice, but he will stand by it because, even in the worst circumstances, he believes that it was the best option available to him at the time.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

Hubris, arrogance, is just one step ahead of loss of integrity, because if you think you're better than other people, you know more, then you're going to think, as many leaders have, that the rules don't apply to them - so they lose their integrity.

Pride has a greater share than goodness in the reproofs we give other people for their faults; and we chide them not so much to make them mend those faults as to make them believe that we ourselves are without fault.

The moment you believe your own crap and excuses, you fail.

Power. like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. To acquire it, appears not more difficult than to be dispossessed of it when acquired, since it enables the holder to shift his own errors on dependents, and to take their merits to himself. But the miracle of losing it vanishes, when we reflect that we are as liable to fall as to rise, by the treachery of others; and that to say "I am" is language that has been appropriated exclusively to God!

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

Whatever makes us feel superior to other people, whatever tempts us to convey a sense of superiority, that is the gravity of our sinful nature, not grace.

There is always the fear of self-righteousness possessing us, the fear of arrogating to ourselves a superiority that we do not possess.

I believe that everything that you do bad comes back to you. So everything that I do that's bad, I'm going to suffer from it. But in my mind, I believe what I'm doing is right. So I feel like I'm going to heaven

The arrogance that accompanies merit offends us even more than the arrogance of people who are lacking in merit: since merit itself offends us.

What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don't want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.