John Adams by David McCullough

• "All that part of Creation that lies within our observation is liable to change. Even mighty states and kingdoms are not exempted." - John Adams, 39
• "he would bend his whole soul to the law. He would let nothing distract him...'Reputation,' wrote Adams, 'ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts, and aim of my behavior.'" - 46
• "Why have I not genius to start some new thought?...Some thing that will surprise the world?" - John Adams, 47
• "The first news of the Stamp Act reached the American colonies during the last week of May 1765 and produced an immediate uproar, and in Massachusetts especially...The new law, the first British attempt to tax Americans directly, had been passed by Parliament to help pay for the cost of the French and Indian War and to meet the expense of maintaining a colonial military force to prevent Indian wars." - 59
• "above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books." - John Adams, 64
• "Pen, ink, and paper and a sitting posture are great helps to attention and thinking." - John Adams, 66
• "The happiness of the people was the purpose of government...and therefore that form of government was best which produced the greatest amount of happiness for the largest number." - 102
• "Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant." - John Adams, 103
• "We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world." - John Adams, 127
• "With independence proclaimed, confederation - a working union of the colonies - had become the focus of 'spirit' animating the delegates. Union was as essential as independence, nearly all contended - indeed, more important in the view of many - and the issues to be resolved were formidable." - 146
• "The confederacy is to make us one individual only; it is to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We shall no longer retain our separate individuality, but become a single individual as to all questions submitted to the confederacy." - John Adams, 147
• "As time would prove, he had written one of the great, enduring documents of the American Revolution. The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world." - 225
• "Everything in life should be done with reflection." - John Adams, 259
• "A chronic acquirer, Jefferson is not known to have ever denied himself anything he wished in the way of material possessions or comforts." - 319
• "One had only to stand on any London bridge, said a guidebook, to see fleets of ships 'carrying away the manufactures of Britain and bringing back the produce of the whole earth,' a spectacle illustrating Adams' chief concern as ambassador, since none was American." - 341
• "Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, 'a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.'" - 364
• "I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere." - Thomas Jefferson, 371
• "He could not accept the idea of enshrining reason as a religion, as desired by the philosophes. 'I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.'" - 418
• "How few aim at the good of the whole, without aiming too much at the prosperity of parts." - John Adams, 422
• "The one, Hamilton, disliked and distrusted the French, while, for the good of the American economy, strongly favoring better relations with Britain. The other, Jefferson, disliked and distrusted the British, while seeing in France and the French Revolution the embodiment of the highest ideals of the American Revolution." - 436
• "Written in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions declared that each state had a 'natural right' to nullify federal actions it deemed unconstitutional. The states were thus to be the arbiters of federal authority." - 521
• "Washington's death had seemed to mark the close of one era; the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte ushered in another." - 534-5
• "Despite the malicious attacks on him, the furor over the Alien and Sedition Acts, unpopular taxes, betrayals by his own cabinet, the disarray of the Federalists, and the final treachery of Hamilton, he had, in fact, come very close to winning [a second term] in the electoral count." - 556
• "Were it not for John Adams making peace with France, there might never have been a Louisiana Purchase." - 586
• "Unlike Jefferson, who seldom ever marked a book, and then only faintly in pencil, Adams, pen in hand, loved to add his comments in the margins. It was part of the joy of reading for him, to have something to say himself, to talk back to, agree or take issue with, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, or Joseph Priestly." - 619

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk - Chs. 3,4

Chapter 3: Rehearsal for the Great Game

• see Captain Charles Christie's Mission to Herat and Lieutenant Henry Pottinger's observations of Baluchistan and Kerman
• "Early in 1812, to the immense relief of London and Calcutta, the alarming partnership between Napoleon and Alexander had broken up. In June of that year Napoleon attacked, not India, but Russia, and to the astonishment of the world suffered the most catastrophic reverse in history. The threat to India had been lifted. Or so it seemed to a wildly rejoicing Britain." - 56

Chapter 4: The Russian Bogy

• March 30, 1814: "Alexander, convinced now that he had been ordained by the Almighty to rid the world of Napoleon, was not content simply to drive them back beyond his own frontiers. He pursued the French half-way across Europe to Paris, entering it in triumph" - 58
• "If one man could be said to be responsible for the creation of the Russian bogy, it was a much-decorated British general named Sir Robert Wilson....It was on his return [from Russia as the official British observer] to London that Wilson drew official wrath upon himself by launching a one-man campaign against the Russians." - 59
• 1817: Wilson publishes A Sketch of the Military and Political Power of Russia; "In it he claimed that the Russians, emboldened by their sudden rise to power, were planning to carry out Peter the Great's supposed death-bed command that they conquer the world." - 60
• "Although Wilson had no lack of supporters among the intelligentsia and the liberals, who abhorred Alexander's authoritarian rule, and from newspapers and journals of like view, he was largely shouted down. Nonetheless his book, much of which was based on false assumptions, gave birth to a debate on Russia's every move which would continue for a hundred years or more....The first seeds of Russophobia had been sown." - 61
• 1813: Treaty of Gulistan, "the Shah was obliged to surrender almost all his claims to Georgia and Baku, as well as renouncing all naval rights on the Caspian Sea....All that the Shah got in return, apart from an end to hostilities, was an undertaking from the Tsar that he would support the claim of Abbas Mirza, his son and heir apparent....the Shah had no intention of honouring this treaty which had been forced upon him by his aggressive neighbours" - 66

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk - Forward to Ch.1

Foreword

• "a succession of ambitious Tsars and ruthless generals crushed the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and occupied their lands. Fearing that the Russians would not stop until India too was theirs, the British sent young officers northwards through the passes to spy on them. At times the Great Game spilled over into Afghanistan, Persia, China and Tibet" - xv

Prologue

• 1807: "intelligence reached London which was to cause considerable alarm to both the British government and the [East India] Company's directors. Napoleon Bonaparte, emboldened by his run of brilliant victories in Europe, had put it to Paul's successor, Tsar Alexander I, that they should together invade India and wrest it from British domination" - 2-3
• "diplomatic missions were dispatched [by the British] to the Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan, through whose domains the aggressor [Russia] would have to pass, in the hope of discouraging them from entering into any liaisons with the foe." - 3
• "Indian hill men of exceptional intelligence and resource, specially trained in clandestine surveying techniques, were dispatched across the frontier disguised as Muslim holy men or Buddhist pilgrims. In this way, often at great risk to their lives, they secretly mapped thousands of square miles of previously unexplored terrain with remarkable accuracy. For their part, the Russians used Mongolian Buddhists to penetrate regions considered too dangerous for Europeans." - 5
• "The Afghans, Moscow found too late, were an unbeatable foe." - 7

Chapter 1: The Yellow Peril

• 1206: "The dreadful Mongol whirlwind had been unleashed on the world...by an illiterate military genius named Teumjin, formerly the unknown chief of a minority tribe, whose fame was destined shortly to eclipse even that of Alexander the Great. It was the dream of Genghis Khan, as he was to become known, to conquer the earth, a task which he believed he had been chosen by God to carry out. During the next thirty years, he and his successors almost achieved this. At the height of their power their empire was to stretch from the Pacific coast to the Polish frontier. It embraced the whole of China, Persia, Afghanistan, present-day Central Asia, and parts of northern India and the Caucasus. But more important still, and particularly to our narrative, it included vast tracts of Russia and Siberia." - 12
• "taking advantage of its reduced circumstances and military weakness, Russia's European neighbors began to help themselves freely to its territory. The German principalities, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden all joined in....Crushed thus between their European foes to the west and the Mongols to the east, the Russians were to develop a paranoid dread of invasion and encirclement which has bedeviled their foreign relations ever since." - 13
• "If Catherine [the Great] failed to add either India or Constantinople to her domains, she nonetheless took a number of steps in that direction. Not only did she win back from the Persians the Caucasian territories which Anne had restored to them, but she also took possession of the Crimea, that last surviving stronghold of the Mongol empire." - 21
• "To conquer India we must first make ourselves masters of Egypt." - 22, Napoleon Bonaparte