Adam Schiff Quotes

Those first few weeks are a delirious blur of memories: a welcome dinner for new members in Statuary Hall, where Eve and I were seated with Dick Gephardt and his wife, Jane, laughing about how Adam and Eve were dining with Dick and Jane

If you find that the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history, but if you find the courage to stand up to him, to speak the awful truth to his rank falsehood, your place will be among the Davids who took on Goliath,” Schiff said, appearing to address Republican senators in particular. “Is there one among you who will say, ‘enough’?

The assault on our constitutional order was inspired by people wearing suits and ties and cloaked in the genteel language of congressional debate, but their purpose was no less ominous. We can fortify the defenses of the Capitol. We can reinforce the doors and put up fences. But we cannot guard our democracy against those who walk the halls of Congress, have taken an oath to uphold our Constitution, but refuse to do so.

Though it affected only one family, he believed the ordeal would be of interest to all; already he excelled at inflating a small issue into a larger one, of salvaging radiant principle from a slag heap of detail.

Protests had been heroic, passionate, erudite, and creative. A young Newport woman refused to marry until the odious legislation was repealed. Other female patriots refused to do their part to populate the colonies, which should serve British manufacturers right.

Alone among America’s founders, his is a riches-to-rags story.

Without the character of Samuel Adams,” declared John, “the true history of the American Revolution can never be written.

From Canada to Pensacola, families shuddered at the Act,

By fretting at unfortunate events we double the evil,

Gazing east, Adams elaborated. “Power is intoxicating,” he wrote, “and those who are possessed of it too often grow vain and insolent.

But what does it avail to find fault with what is past,

With each effort to suppress the spirit of liberty, Great Britain managed only to promote it.

The right-minded were those who insisted on colonial liberties. Treason, he held, consisted of the failure to defend those liberties.

A well-connected son of the establishment, he strained to find his place, loitering his way toward his future.

History is that thing that, in hindsight, one always saw coming; a few seem able to glimpse it before it has settled on its destination

the mob and the militia — officially every man between the ages of sixteen and sixty — were one and the same.

The people owed it to themselves to monitor those who governed.

I will stand alone. I will oppose tyranny at the threshold, though the fabric of liberty fall and I perish in its ruins.

He muscled words into deeds,

(Dryly he noted that some individuals enjoyed every political gift except that of discretion.)

To understand why the new president hoped to channel Adams’s spirit is to discover not only where a daring revolutionary came from but where a revolution did.

Thomas Hutchinson observed: “Power, once acquired, is seldom voluntarily parted with.

Adams elaborated. “Power is intoxicating,” he wrote, “and those who are possessed of it too often grow vain and insolent.

A corrupt people would not long remain free. “He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue,” he concluded.

The censure of fools or knaves,” he would remind his wife, “is applause.

As his subject Samuel Adams chose: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?

He excelled at friendship, which at its best he termed “thinking aloud together.

He was unflinching, but touched too on his secret weapon, one especially valuable in 1771: “The opinion of others,” he assured his former father-in-law, “I very little regard.

Differences of opinion should not be construed as differences of principle.

Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction,

Any people who preferred “a wealthy villain” to “an honest upright man in poverty” deserved, Hancock lectured, to find itself oppressed.

Samuel Adams was the kind of man you like to believe exists and rarely meet.

At the same time, was it not absurd to bleat about liberty when the province bought and sold Africans, “taken from all that is dear to them in their native soil”?

We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, “is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.

Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.

He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds.

To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.

There is all the same some truth to the allegation that — as one intimate put it — the American Revolution could be blamed on the Harvard College library.3

Luxury and extravagance,” the adult Adams would fret, “are in my opinion totally destructive of those virtues which are necessary for the preservation of the liberty and happiness of the people.

History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.  — HILARY MANTEL

History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.  — HILARY MANTEL “I

Deeply idealistic — a moral people, Adams held, would elect moral leaders — he believed virtue the soul of democracy. To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.

Let the people keep a watchful eye over the conduct of their rulers,” he explained, “for we are told that great men are not at all times wise. It would be indeed a wonder if in any age or country they were always honest.

By unanimous vote, some fourteen hundred Bostonians, the minority of them merchants, dispatched Greenleaf to inform the acting governor that they were “determined to keep consciences void of offense towards God and towards man.

Were taxes to be levied, Franklin warned, pandemonium would result. Especially when it came to imposing burdens on people, he observed, it was wise to consider what they were inclined to think as well as how they ought to think.

It was an odd thing about Boston, Crown officials observed. A confidential, early-morning insinuation could blossom into common knowledge by evening. Yet when 342 crates of tea immersed themselves in water, no one had seen a thing.

His sympathies lay with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered. A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: “Rulers should have little, the people much.” And privilege should make way for genius and industry.

It was “the duty of every subject, for conscience’s sake, to submit to his authority, while he acts according to the law.” Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, “he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience.

Adams left the floor to Virginia, proud men from the most populous colony, one that shared New England’s views but not its reputation for fire-breathing fanaticism. (John Adams would later claim that this was the reason Washington commanded the army, Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and Richard Henry Lee proposed it.)

In John Adams’s worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislatures, and war.

But there is another story, to which I was an even more direct witness, and that is the story of how a man skilled in deception and intrigue took over an entire political party and bent it to his will. The four years of the Trump presidency destroyed many friendships, and not a few marriages. But it also destroyed the Republican Party—once devoted to robust alliances, a healthy mistrust of executive power, and the expansion of democracy around the world—and turned it into something else, something unrecognizable, an antidemocratic party, a party willing to tear down the institutions of its own government, a party willing to give aid and comfort to a malign foreign power that wishes to destroy us, a party hostile to the truth.

A few columns stand out as Adams’s; he had not yet perfected his prose style, but he had found his voice. He is calm, deliberative, and precise. He is unassailably logical. The sentences are long; the embrace of the semicolon ardent. He did not revert, as did his contemporaries, to the exclamation point, or to long ribbons of capital letters. He trusted muscular reasoning to stand on its own.

His enemies, insisted Adams, came in handy: “Our friends are either blind to our faults or not faithful enough to tell us of them.” He knew that we are governed more by our feelings than by reason; with rigorous logic, he lunged at the emotions. He made a passion of decency. He was a prudent revolutionary. Among the last of his surviving words is a warning to Thomas Paine: “Happy is he who is cautious.

Adams came of age, too, at a time when the Massachusetts economy was markedly on the skids. Plenty of other young men stumbled in finding their footholds. On leaving Harvard shortly after Adams, a future colleague would try his hand as a schoolmaster. Miserable, he sailed off as a merchant, later as a whaler. He was soon back in Boston. In a patched gown, he served briefly as a chaplain. Out of options, he turned to the law.

quickly Franklin folded the owlish John Adams into his debilitating rounds, sweeping him off to meet the la Rochefoucauld family in their baronial home. He did so before Adams yet felt appropriately outfitted for any kind of Parisian outing. That anxiety would underline the difference between the two envoys, one of them self-conscious about his attire, the other confident that fashion would follow him, both of whom were right.

Mitch McConnell so graphically demonstrated when he withheld the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in a shocking act of constitutional disrespect for two other branches of government. Without question, the most profound and relentless assault on our democracy would come during the years of the Trump presidency. But even then, it was the willingness of members of the legislative branch to go along with his serial

Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it. It is a duty. —John Adams

His former mother-in-law attempted to ease the new couple’s burdens by bestowing on them a wedding present in the form of a household slave. In a town where one in five families owned enslaved people, it was a traditional gift. Adams balked. “A slave cannot live in my house,” he declared, insisting, “If she comes, she must be free.” Emancipated, Surrey remained a fixture at the Adams address for nearly fifty years. In conjunction with a Rhode Island doctor, Adams began to formulate a campaign against slavery.

To understand why the new president hoped to channel Adams’s spirit is to discover not only where a daring revolutionary came from but where a revolution did. His curious career explains how the American colonies lurched from “spotlessly loyal” to “stark, staring mad” in fifteen dizzying years, how a group of drenched, pipe-smoking Massachusetts farmers, fifty miles from Boston and thousands from London, might reason that they should act sooner rather than later if they did not care to be “finessed out of their liberties.

The matter of voting settled, Cushing moved that Congress open their deliberations with a prayer. New York and South Carolina objected. Their ranks included Episcopalians and Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians. How could they conceivably worship together? It was the larger question writ small: How to reconcile the diversity of convictions? On September 6, Adams rose for his first congressional speech. Personally he had no trouble with “a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue, who was at the same time a friend to his country

Midnight is the darkest moment of the day, everywhere in the world. But it is also the most hopeful, because everything that comes after holds the promise of light.

nation to conduct a sham investigation of them—what would we think then? “Would

On Trump: You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t.

It is midnight in Washington. ... How did we get here?

I came to understand how the Kremlin exploits the most basic human vulnerabilities: preying on those who feel unappreciated and resentful, who are fixated on money and success, who have a history of dishonesty and are prone to infidelity.

Outside an airport one evening in Charlotte, as I waited by the curb for an Uber, a stranger approached me and said in a soft, conspiratorial tone: “You’re Adam Schiff, right?” The man was in his midthirties, short, and with a pronounced Southern accent. “Yes.” “You can tell me—there’s nothing to this ‘collusion’ stuff, is there?” “Let me ask you a question,” I responded. “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta, and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign to deliver it. Then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?” “I think I see where you’re going here,” he said, hesitantly. “Now, what if I also told you that after the election, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine U.S. sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?” He paused for a moment, thinking it over, then said: “You know, I probably would.” His car arrived and he took off, leaving me at the curb. It had been one of those “eureka” moments, and I remember thinking, “Now, if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.

good prosecutor. But I do not think that conduct—criminal or not—is okay. And the day we do think that’s okay is the day we will look back and say, “That is the day America lost its way.” And I will tell you one more thing that is apropos of the hearing today: I don’t think it’s okay that during a presidential campaign, Mr. Trump sought the Kremlin’s help to consummate a real estate deal in Moscow that would make him a fortune; according to the Special Counsel, hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t think it is okay that he concealed it from the public. I don’t think it is okay that he advocated a new and more favorable policy toward the Russians even as he was seeking the Russians’ help—the Kremlin’s help—to make money. I don’t think it’s okay that his attorney lied to our committee. There is a different word for that than collusion. And it is called “compromise.” And that is the subject of our hearing today.

When an administration skews its intelligence to serve a desired policy—instead of using sound intelligence to inform policy—we get disasters like the Iraq War.

Benghazi demonstrated the willingness of Republican leaders and their media allies to exploit the deaths of Americans and propagate baseless conspiracy theories to advance their political interests.

The foundation of a people’s ruin is often at first laid in small, and almost imperceptible encroachments upon their liberties,” he warned.

dangerous union of legislative and executive power in the same persons.

and hinted that Congressman Adam Schiff [AS] was once a CIA asset and is still under their control.

And here, to answer that question, we must look at the history of this presidency and to the character of this president—or lack of character—and ask, can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in that very election?…And the short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is, no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing, not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change, and you know it.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education and schools were forced to integrate, local officials in that county decided that they would get rid of school altogether. The public schools shut down, and the more affluent white children attended private school for the next several years. The Black children simply had no school.

During the convention, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Adam Schiff sent a letter to Obama, asking him to declassify the intelligence on Russian meddling.

But the fact the FBI had it, or that Representative Adam Schiff quoted from it in public, didn’t release the press from a basic obligation: to either verify the truth or treat the document for what it was—slander. Instead, the media repeated the dossier’s claims (Carter Page met with shady Russians, etc.) ad nauseum, barely bothering to note that they had not been proven.

Power is intoxicating,” he wrote, “and those who are possessed of it too often grow vain and insolent.

So in despotic governments are the motions of the subjects watched.