“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer (allow) their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”

—John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756