political_talk

John Adams on His Election to the House of Representatives

In a letter to Benjamin Rush,  Adams wrote of having been chosen to become a member of the House of Representatives.

When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, "I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate." She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, "Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined." These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's.

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John Adams on the Jewish Religion

In a letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp, a Dutch minister, in 1809, Adams wrote of his admiration for the tenets of the Jewish religion. His opinion of Christianity is here.

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

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Source: WikiQuote

John Adams on Christianity

In an 1814 letter to his friend, John Taylor, Adams denigrated Christianity as incapable of real "inquiry".

And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes

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Source:  Letter to John Taylor

Thomas Jefferson on the Role of the Judiciary

From a letter to Monsieur A. Coray, Oct 31, 1823, by Thomas Jefferson:

At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons - Painting of Thomas Jefferson in 1805 by Rembrandt Peale

Whenever the people are well informed.....

Thomas Jefferson | Democratic-Republican Party¹

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

¹The Democratic-Republican Party was the dominant political party in the United States from 1800-1824; it then split in to two factions, one of which became the modern day Democratic Party.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Quotation: Letter to Richard Price (8 January 1789)

Thomas Jefferson Quotation on a Free Press

Thomas Jefferson | Democratic-Republican Party¹

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

¹The Democratic-Republican Party was the dominant political party in the United States from 1800-1824; it then split in to two factions, one of which became the modern day Democratic Party.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons,
Quotation: Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington (16 January 1787) Lipscomb & Bergh ed. 6:57

Thomas Jefferson Quotation on Freedom of the Press

Thomas Jefferson | Democratic-Republican Party¹

 Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

¹The Democratic-Republican Party was the dominant political party in the United States from 1800-1824; it then split in to two factions, one of which became the modern day Democratic Party.

Quotation: Letter to Dr. James Currie (28 January 1786) Lipscomb & Bergh 18:ii

Thomas Jefferson Quotation on Judicial Review

Thomas Jefferson | Democrat-Republican Party¹

Jefferson strongly opposed judicial review, and in a letter to William Jarvis in 1820, he had this to say:

 To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

¹The Democratic-Republican Party was the dominant political party in the United States from 1800-1824; it then split in to two factions, one of which became the modern day Democratic Party.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, Jefferson on Mount Rushmore
Quotation: Letter to William C. Jarvis, 1820

Thomas Jefferson Quotation on Rightful Liberty

Thomas Jefferson | Democratic-Republican Party¹

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

¹The Democratic-Republican Party was the dominant political party in the United States from 1800-1824; it then split in to two factions, one of which became the modern day Democratic Party.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons, Painting by Rembrandt Peale
Quotation: Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, April 4, 1819 in Appleby and Ball (1999) p 224.