John Quincy Adams — Diaries

Why it’s on the list: John Quincy Adams’s lifelong diary, kept for nearly seventy years as confessional, aide-mémoire and proving ground, in the Library of America edition edited by David Waldstreicher. Distinct from the Traub biography John Quincy Adams, which I’ve read.

Where I heard about it

• My own highlights — I sampled it and saved highlights, but haven’t read it through.

Connections

• John Quincy Adams
• Journaling
• John Adams

Highlights

Partial highlights captured via Readwise — Kyle sampled this book; not a full read.

• “Have you kept a regular Journal? If you have not, you will be likely to forget most of the Observations you have made. If you have omitted this Usefull Exercise, let me advise you to recommence it, immediately. Let it be your Amusement, to minute every day, whatever you may have seen or heard worth Notice. One contracts a Fondness of Writing by Use. We learn to write readily, and what is of more importance, We think, and improve our Judgments, by committing our Thoughts to Paper.” John Adams to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1783
• The devotion with which Adams maintained his diary, even when the press of events made doing so burdensome, suggests that it served a number of essential purposes for him, as a confessional, an aide-mémoir, and as a proving ground for his thoughts on everything from public policy to philosophy.
• As the general Turn of the Conversation was upon Politicks; there was nothing in it, necessary to be transcribed here.