“A native of America who cannot read and write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.”
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
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John Adams 202
2nd President of the United States 1735–1826Related quotes
[How we die: reflections on life's final chapter, Vintage, 1995, Random House, 1995, 8, https://books.google.com/books?id=ffj03ghdnqwC&pg=PA8]
How We Die (1994)

Source: How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday

As quoted in All Our Relations Native Struggle For Land & Life (1999), pg.101

David Foster Wallace, author in 2006 article in the New York Times titled Federer as Religious Experience http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

Aphorism 22
Les Caractères (1688), Du mérite personnel
Context: From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 2. Earth Among the Stars (p. 13)