John Adams on liberty

From our second President, John Adams:

• 
  There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
• Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
• Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
• Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
• There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
• Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
• Always stand on principle even if you stand alone.
• Power always thinks...that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
• Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
• Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.
• The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know.... Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.
• Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
• Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.
• I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
• Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.