"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
"Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors."
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Source: John Adams (2015). “The Works of John Adams Vol. 6: Defence of the Constitution IV, Discourses on Davila”, p.11, Jazzybee Verlag
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