Famous Henry Adams Quotations

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"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
by Henry Adams
"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."
by Henry Adams
"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
by Henry Adams
"A friend in power is a friend lost."
by Henry Adams
"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
by Henry Brooke Adams
"Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect."
by Henry Adams
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops."
by Henry Adams
"Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage."
by Henry Adams
"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."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"Friends are born, not made."
by Henry Adams
"Henry James chews more than he bites off."
by Mrs Henry Adams (c. 1880)
"In peace, competition had become difficult, until the British ship owner cried for war; yet he already felt, without acknowledging it even to himself, that in war he was likely to enjoy little profit or pleasure on the day when the long, low, black hull of the Yankee privateer, with her tapering, bending spars, her long-range guns, and her sharp-faced captain, should appear on the western horizon, and suddenly, at the sight of heavy-lumbering British merchantman, should fling out her white wings of canvas, and fly down on her prey."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence--beginning with one's own."
by Henry Adams
"Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation"
by Henry Brooks Adams
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
by Henry Adams
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts."
by Henry Adams
"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible."
by Henry Adams
"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone."
by Henry Adams
"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."
by Henry Adams
"The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men"
by Henry B. Adams
"There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence."
by Henry Adams
"We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable"
by Henry Brooks Adams
"We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable."
by Henry B. Adams
"What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn."
by Henry Adams
"Whatever happens at all happens as it should thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely."
by Henry Adams
"You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength."
by Henry Adams
"As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore."
by Henry Adams
"Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage."
by Henry Adams
"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."
by Henry Adams
"The proper study of mankind is woman."
by Henry Adams
"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."
by Henry Adams
"In the one branch he most needed"
by Henry Adams
"The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong."
by Henry Adams
"Morality is a private and costly luxury."
by Henry Adams
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
by Henry Adams
"Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."
by Henry Adams
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
by Henry Adams
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own."
by Henry Adams
"Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion."
by Henry Adams
"Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."
by Henry Adams
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious."
by Henry Adams
"'If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our societ..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have lived in a ..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of educatio..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless ene..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with t..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man who had ever ..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings or die. For our..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pri..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into exis..."
by Henry Brooks Adams
"You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living—of every statesman—every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the l..."
by Henry Brooks Adams


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