“To be good, and to do good, is the whole duty of man comprised in a few words.”
Letter to Elizabeth Shaw (1784), quoted in John Adams (2001) by David McCullough, p. 310
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Abigail Adams 40
2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801) 1744–1818Related quotes
Non-Violent Resistance - Often misquoted as "You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance."
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)
Context: You assist an unjust administration most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil administration never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil.
A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.
“A man’s word must be as good as an oath sworn beneath the Light or it was no good at all.”
Source: (January 2004), Chapter 1: The Hook. p. 6
“I don't aspire to be a good man. I aspire to be a whole man.”
“An honest man's word is as good as his bond.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book IV, Ch. 34.
“To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.”
Freeman (1948), p. 166
Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 352 (footnote); citing F. Uberweg, History of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. 1, p. 71.
Variant: To a wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland.
Recapitulation
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
“Few women care what a man looks like, and a good thing too.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men
“In a word, man in London is not quite so good a creature as he is out of it.”
The Ayrshire Legatees (Edinburgh: Blackwood, [1821] 1823) pp. 163-4.