Stacy Adams Quotes

The key is to figure out how God can effectively use you where you're planted now, regardless of how you got there.

She fixed a smile that she hoped looked authentic. Pretending to be content continued to be hard work.

If I were a character in one of my books, I'd be the optimistic one, believing the best and urging others to do the same.

She was returning home to be the wife of, mother of, First Lady of, but what did that really mean?

She is the crescendo, the final astonishing work of God. Woman. In one least flourish creation comes to a finish not with Adam, but with Eve. She is the Master’s finishing touch… His piece de resistance. She fills a place in the world nothing and no one else can fill… (Ladies) Look out across the earth and say to yourselves, “The whole, vast world is incomplete without me. Creation reached its zenith in me.

No matter how much restitution she paid with every word and deed, her blood-stained hands could never really be clean, even if no one else knew they were dirty.

The door wasn’t closing. Shiloh’s spirit opened up as she considered the possibilities.

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 A young Newport woman refused to marry until the odious legislation was repealed.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.

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.

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

We are like those oysters in many ways...Irritants, or foreign objects, infiltrate our lives in the form of bad choices, jealousy, fear, deep loss, and countless other challenges I could name. We choose how to handle things that come, either by rallying our strength and faith and finding a way to go on, or by giving into the pressure and giving up. When we choose to stand up inside and protect our spirits, our hearts, and the essence of who we are, we produce a substance similar to what the oyster produces to form the layers of the pearl. In us, it's called character, integrity, grace, courage, and the ability to love ourselves and others, with no strings attached.

Translation, it read: But you will not even need to fight. Take your positions; then stand still and watch the LORD’s victory. He is with you, O people of Judah and Jerusalem. Do not be afraid or discouraged. Go out against them tomorrow, for the LORD is with you!

You never know what the wind will blow your way, baby; you’ve just got to be prepared to dance to the music God provides.

STG — his acronym for Simply Trust God. The idea

Someone once told me that all dogs have superpowers. Duke’s was communication. He whined when something was up. He yipped when someone wasn’t telling the truth. He even howled the words “I love you.

The narrow passageway curved and opened into a space at the top of the tower. I banged my knee against one of the boulders as I exited. A cool breeze blew. I shivered, and a sense of unease overcame me.

Since Lou was responsible for decorating some of the most prominent spots in town, I understood why he was so upset. “Do you have any idea who’s behind it?” “I can’t imagine who’d be such a Grinch. You have to help me find the thief before my whole holiday decorating business is destroyed.

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.

Can I really do this?

In that moment, she knew she would take the coward’s way out,

Be thoughtful and strategic, but also be open to blessings arriving in unexpected forms.

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.