John Adams: A Life QUOTES

1 " At first glance, young John Adams’s obsession with recognition seems odd. In contrast to the great mass of his contemporaries, his yearning was exceptional. Yet when Adams is compared to other high achievers of his generation, his behavior appears more normal. Young Washington sought recognition just as fervently, and he impatiently pursued a commission in the British army during the French and Indian War as the most rapid means of procuring attention. The youthful Thomas Jefferson dreamed of someday sitting on the King’s Council in Virginia, while Alexander Hamilton, born too late to soldier in the war in the 1750s, announced: “I contemn the grovling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune, &c., contemns me.” He wished for war, through which he could be catapulted into notoriety; his hero was James Wolfe, the British general who died in the assault on Quebec in 1759. Benjamin Franklin, who grew up earlier in Boston, exhibited the same industriousness and ambition that Adams would evince. He mapped out an extensive regimen of self-improvement, as did Adams, and found his role models in Jesus and Socrates. Adams, and many others who would subsequently play an important role in the affairs of early America, were the sort of men that historian Douglass Adair aptly describes as “passionately selfish and self-interested,” men who shared a common attribute, a love of fame.23 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

2 " Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman. . . . [Perhaps] you could resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found the Art of lying together?” Adams must have been mortified. He blushed but stammered cleverly, or so he remembered, that the first couple surely “flew together . . . like two Objects in electric Experiments.” “Well,” the lady responded, “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy Shock.”21 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

3 " It was anything but reassuring to have to tell one’s wife, in “Case of real Danger . . . fly to the Woods with our Children. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

4 " He also embraced a cyclical theory of history. History, he believed, flowed in cycles. Infant nations were virtuous and uncorrupted, but with age they grew tainted, eventually falling into decline and succumbing to their encumbering maladies and vices. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

5 " Washington had learned the secrets of inducing others to follow his lead. Washington probably knew more about leadership before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday than John Adams discovered in his lifetime. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

6 " One thing is certain, however; whereas it has been almost commonplace among historians to attribute Adams’s opposition to Franklin’s style of diplomacy to simple jealousy, in fact Adams also was critical of his fellow envoy because of a genuine concern that America might be ruined by anything less than a wary, coequal, unbending relationship with its new ally.38 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

7 " The last officer named was Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island; a man of limited education and military experience limited to two years of peacetime militia duty, he nevertheless was destined to be the best of the lot.27 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

8 " efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

9 " Adams had little experience working with others in a legislative setting, and his obdurate manner and natural impatience did not fully suit him for such an undertaking. Yet, his courtroom skills and his pluck or “pertness,” as he referred to it, served him well. Mostly, however, Adams’s star rose because of other factors. The very force of his intellect was crucial to his emergence as an important force in Congress. At each step of his ascent, Adams’s acuity and his imposing intellectual grasp had impressed others. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

10 " In the next two years he would sit on ninety committees, chairing twenty-five. No other congressman came even remotely close to carrying such a heavy work load. Soon he was acknowledged “to be the first man in the House,” as Benjamin Rush reported.28 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

11 " The surface causes of Adams’s anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

12 " But if Adams was certain of the necessity of the war, he found it difficult to reconcile himself to the role he should play in the conflict. Could he morally order other men to risk death on America’s battlefields if he did not likewise face harm? Should he bear arms? Was he less than a man if he did not soldier? Adams struggled with these matters. For a sensitive man such as John Adams, it produced a terrible quandary. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

13 " By the fall of 1775 no one in Congress labored more ardently than Adams to hasten the day when America would be separate from Great Britain. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

14 " If that was not enough, Franklin also kept his exhausted younger cohort awake far into the night with an interminable disquisition on colds. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

15 " Adams’s proclivity for truculence and curtness probably emerged early. Uncertain of his abilities and laboring under an exaggerated sense of inadequacy, he probably fashioned such an aggressive manner as a defense mechanism. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

16 " I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecutre, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

17 " and by mid-1781 it had caused him to conclude that France now sought a graceful exit from this stalemated war. Although he did not know it—nor would he ever learn the truth—his judgment was correct. Vergennes was prepared to consent to a long term truce uti possidetis; a diminutive United States would have existed, but Great Britain almost certainly would have retained Maine, northern Vermont, the Carolinas, Georgia, the tramontane West, and portions of New York, including New York City, and New England doubtless would be denied access to the Newfoundland fisheries.53 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

18 " Clearly, the John Adams of 1774 was quite different from the man who proclaimed “Farewell Politicks” in 1766 and again in 1771 and 1772. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

19 " A long silence followed Dickinson’s address. Would no one answer? Finally, fubsy, garrulous John Adams rose. He spoke extemporaneously. There was no need for notes. He had made the same speech, more or less, for a year. Jefferson, perhaps used to a different style of oratory in Virginia, later said that Adams was “not graceful or elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but others would speak of “the magic of his eloquence,” his “genuine eloquence,” his “resistless eloquence”; it was even said that his speech was “higher than all “eloquence.” Calm, assured, Adams nevertheless began by wishing aloud for the deftness of the great orators of antiquity. Proceeding in a tone that he later characterized as courteous, he reiterated the proindependence case, an argument every bit as familiar as the one that Dickinson had just presented. Separation would be beneficial to America. The new nation could chart its own course. Peace and prosperity would be the great rewards of independence. Unlike Dickinson’s remarks, resonating with a fear of the unknown, Adams’s muted address rang with palpable contempt for the present while exulting in the possibilities of the future.16 "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life

20 " It was the greatest speech that Adams ever delivered. He was “our Colossus on the floor,” Jefferson said later, adding that Adams had spoken “with a power of thought and expression, that moved us from our seats.” Richard Stockton of New Jersey, one of those who had just entered Congress, was mesmerized by Adams’s speech. The “force of his reasoning” made it clear that there was no choice but independence, he wrote to his son. “The man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency is Mr. John Adams of Boston. I call him the Atlas of American Independence. "

― John Ferling , John Adams: A Life