Words matter. These are the best Henry Adams Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
They know enough who know how to learn.
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.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Intimates are predestined.
Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
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.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
Friends are born, not made.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
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.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
