Burke and Adams had much in common. Adams read Burke's Philosophical Inquiry, for example, as part of his preparation for life and... a career. Burke--who had sympathized with the American Revolution--after all, the patriots were only seeking their rights as Englishmen--became the avowed enemy of the French Revolution. Adams for his part was not only a thinker, he was a doer: a daring patriot, diplomat, vice-president and president. Yet he never abandoned the life of the mind, as his discourse against the French Revolution attests. Burke and Adams had their similar views on events because they each saw man as disposed to selfishness, requiring public institutions to which civic allegiance is owed to restrain those ignoble instincts so that the virtuous side of people would have a chance to flourish. It was, oddly, an optimism based on a pessimistic estimate of human nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are two kinds of talent, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-giv...en talent, you just touch it up once in a while.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Napoleon never wished to be justified. He killed his enemy according to Corsican traditions [le droit corse] and if he sometimes r...egretted his mistake, he never understood that it had been a crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The presence of the blacks is the greatest evil that threatens the United States. They increase, in the Gulf States, faster than d...o the whites. They cannot be kept for ever in slavery, since the tendencies of the modern world run strongly the other way. They cannot be absorbed into the white population, for the whites will not intermarry with them, not even in the North where they have been free for two generations. Once freed, they would be more dangerous than now, because they would not long submit to be debarred from political rights. A terrible struggle would ensue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to ...be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »