John Adams Quotes

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

Utopia means elsewhere.

We can make this country the garden of Eden.

This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

We are indebted to the Book of books (Bible) for our national ideals and institution. Their preservation rests in adhering to it's precepts.

Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.

As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.

The relationship between the films and the individual Commandments [is] a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.

Let's build Paradise again.

All systems of morality are fine. The gospel alone has exhibited a complete assemblage of the principles of morality, divested of all absurdity. It is not composed, like your creed, of a few common-place sentences put into bad verse. Do you wish to see that which is really sublime? Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

My conscience is captive to the Word of God

Some people automatically associate morality and altruism with a religious vision of the world. But I believe it is a mistake to think that morality is an attribute only of religion. We can imagine two types of spirituality: one tied to religion, while the other arises spontaneously in the human heart as an expression of love for our neighbors and a desire to do them good.

Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

Let the Bible be the Bible. It's not about science. It's not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of a ll Utopias - boredom.