Quote #102

What for me makes people like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and John Adams and George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan such extraordinary leaders is that they had integrity through and through. What they were on the inside and what they said on the outside was harmonious. There a lot of people like that. I think that if people try to live a very different personal life not consistent with the role they've assumed as a governor or senator or president, we lose something as a nation.

More from John Adams

  1. The President's title, as proposed by the Senate, was the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of. It is a proof the more of th…
  2. Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than unitarianism.
  3. He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can…
  4. The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
  5. The 'divinity' of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oath…
  6. As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity …
  7. Genius is sorrow's child.
  8. Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!

All John Adams quotes