Selected Abigail Adams Quotations

Abigail Adams, like her friend, Mercy Otis Warren, was certainly a creature of the Enlightenment.  Although not formally schooled, she was nevertheless well educated at home and very well read, as were many of that generation, including such luminaries as George Washington and John Marshall.  Because John and Abigail Adams spent many of their married years apart, a rich trove of letters survives, giving deep insight into the characters of both parties.  Abigail Adams corresponded with many others, not the least of whom was Thomas Jefferson, with whom she carried on a lengthy correspondence that dealt into sophisticated political ideas.  A true feminist, she was ahead of her time and served as a model for later women who battles heroically for equal rights for women.

Letter from Abigail Adams to President Thomas Jefferson.

Abigail Adams Biography

• Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.
• Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
• If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
• It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne.
• Great necessities call out great virtues.
• Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex.
• The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex, was to be found in the families of the educated class and in occasional intercourse with the learned. (1817)
• I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country.
• These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
• I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give. The great fish swallow up the small, and he who is most strenuous for the Rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of Government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

Jefferson's letter to John Adams upon hearing of Abigail's death.

“Tried myself, in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medecines. I will not, therefore, by useless condolances, open afresh the sluices of your grief nor, altho' mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more, where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.”

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