John Quincy Adams Quotes

How I longed to see these things; how I longed to see the Liberty Bell and walk on the streets where Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin had walked.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

Patrick Henry aligned himself against ratification. So did Richard Henry Lee.

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for Independence.

The true history of the American Revolution can never be written… A great many if the people in those days were not at all what they seemed, nor what they were generally believed to be.

'Johnny Tremain,' Paul Revere's Ride, today's Tea Partiers - you have to tune all that out to get at the real story.

There are plenty of Minutemen. People willing to be Minutemen. Where are the people that want to be George Washington? Where are the Benjamin Franklins? Where is Sam Adams? Where is John Adams?

People don't even recognize who the Founding Fathers of the United States were. They were exceptional human beings - when you signed the Declaration of Independence, that was a death warrant they signed their name to. You have to have courage to put your name on a death warrant against the most powerful nation in the world at that time. And yet, we didn't honor who they really were. They were deists. They lived an enlightened belief system.

There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!

Yes here's to the founding fathers - slave-owners, British citizens who didn't want to pay taxes.

New Hampshire is one of the birthplaces of American freedom and independence - a place with a love and a passion for liberty.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy, but he was actively involved.

Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who coldly betrays not only a sacred cause but every moral scruple along the way.

In January 1776, Thomas Paine issued 'Common Sense,' advocating independence from Great Britain.

I would like to acquire a document autographed by John Witherspoon, who signed the Declaration of Independence and is one of my American heroes.

The Founding Fathers are not just some people that happened to get mad a long time ago and want their freedom. They were special people in addition to what their natural yearnings were.

Hey, our Founding Fathers wore long hair and powdered wigs - I don't see anybody trying to look like them today, either... But we do look to them as role models.

Robert Treat Paine was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

I—here in the presence of Almighty God, as I hope for ease, honor and comfort in this world, and happiness in the world to come, most earnestly, devoutly and religiously swear; that I will neither directly of indirectly assist the wicked instruments of ministerial tyranny and villainy, commonly called the king’s troops and navy, by furnishing them with provisions and refreshments of any kind …. I will neither directly or indirectly convey any intelligence, nor give any advice to the foresaid enemies describe …. I will whenever called upon by the voice of the continental congress or by that of … this particular colony … to take arms and subject myself to military discipline in defense of the common rights and liberties of America…

To back away from France would be to undermine the cause of republicanism in America

There were more Americans in the British Army during the Revolution than there were in the American Army.

… persons, whose design, from the beginning of their opposition to the Stamp Act, was to throw off all subordination and connection with Great Britain; who meant by every fiction, falsehood and fraud, to delude the people from their due allegiance, to throw the subsisting Governments into anarchy, to incite the ignorant and vulgar to arms, and with those arms to establish American Independence --- were Congregational and Presbyterian republicans, or men of bankrupt fortunes, overwhelmed in debt to the British merchants.