Henry Adams Quotes

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

They know enough who know how to learn.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

Friends are born, not made.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.