excel

Massachusetts kitchen as law office

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 their minds to grovel and creep in infancy,
they will grovel all their lives.
- John Adams [1735-1826]

An earlier reference to Adams here.