This comes from Adams’s letter to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, 19 April 1817, and it is confirmed in the manuscript transcription. He says he was tempted to “break out” with this line, then rejects it at once: “Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.”
“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it” John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817. Adams immediately added: “But in this exclamation I Should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.” · Verbatim: “Twenty times, in the course of my late Reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it"!!! But in this exclamation I Should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.”
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Provenance
The letter it comes from
Document
Letter, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson
Written
Quincy, Massachusetts, 19 April 1817
Manuscript
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division
Printed
The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), p. 254
One day, when the Schoolmaster had been more than commonly fanatical, and declared “if he were a Monark, He would have but one Religion in his Dominions” The Parson coolly replied “Cleverly! You would be the best Man in the World, if you had no Religion.” Twenty times, in the course of my late Reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it”!!! But in this exclamati[on] I Should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.
Adams to Jefferson, 19 April 1817
This is the manuscript spelling and capitalization as transcribed in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 11. “Bryant” is Lemuel Bryant, Adams’s boyhood parish priest, and “Cleverly” is Joseph Cleverly, his Latin schoolmaster. Both are introduced earlier in the same letter.
The full letter is transcribed from the manuscript in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 11, on Founders Online ↗. The edition places the original at the Library of Congress.
Jefferson quoted the line back in his reply of 5 May 1817 ↗. He agreed with it only if “religion” meant “Sectarian dogmas.”
Wikiquote’s John Adams page ↗ lists the passage as sourced to this letter and warns that the italicized part “has often been quoted out of context.” We found no Quote Investigator article on it.
✓Public domain
The words come from Adams’s own 1817 letter, which was printed in The Works of John Adams, vol. 10, in 1856. Both dates are well before 1931, so the text is in the U.S. public domain. Modern editorial annotations on Founders Online are separately copyrighted by their publishers.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Real words, reversed meaning
This is not a fake quote. It is a clipped one. Adams wrote the sentence only to say he had been tempted to blurt it out, and then he called that temptation fanatical. Popular versions stop before his answer.
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Quote sitesStand-alone versions credited to John Adams Out of context
Quotewise ↗ shows the line by itself, ending at “religion in it,” with no sign that Adams went on to reject it.
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Partial excerptsExcerpts that stop at the “!!!” Truncated
Goodreads ↗ gives the “Twenty times” lead-in but ends at the exclamation. It leaves out the sentences in which Adams calls the thought fanatical and says a world without religion would be “Hell.”
✓Adams did write the line, but as a thought he turned down: “in this exclamati[on] I Should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.” (letter of 19 April 1817 ↗)
Context
Why it matters
The line is set up by a story from Adams’s boyhood. His schoolmaster, Joseph Cleverly, said that as a monarch he would allow only one religion. The parish priest, Lemuel Bryant, answered: “Cleverly! You would be the best Man in the World, if you had no Religion.” Adams then admits he has often wanted to say the same of the whole world, and immediately calls that urge as fanatical as either man. The editors of the Jefferson Papers note that “best of all possible worlds” echoes Leibniz.
Jefferson read it the same way. In his reply of 5 May 1817 ↗ he wrote that if religion meant “Sectarian dogmas” the exclamation was “just.” If it meant shared moral precepts, then without it the world would be, “as you again say, ‘something not fit to be named, even indeed a Hell.’”
Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell.
The rest of the passage
Adams goes on: “So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human Nature; I believe there is no Individual totally depraved. … while Conscience remains there is Some Religion.” The Library of Congress shows the holograph letter ↗ in its exhibition Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, where it quotes the “Hell” sentence.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1735–1826 · Second U.S. president & Founding Father
John Adams was a Massachusetts lawyer and revolutionary leader. He became the second President of the United States (1797–1801). In retirement at Quincy he kept up a long and famously frank exchange of letters with his old rival Thomas Jefferson, full of reading, religion and philosophy. The 1817 letter quoted here is part of that exchange.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, Quincy, April 19, 1817, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 11, 19 January to 31 August 1817, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 267–70; also printed in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 10 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 254.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it’?” Last verified 2 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/this-would-be-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds-if-there-were/