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Henry Adams Quotes

Henry Adams

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Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Power
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Politics
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Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Travel
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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.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Trust
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Alone
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All experience is an arch, to build upon.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Experience
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Intelligence
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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.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Sad
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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.
- Henry Adams
Collection: History
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No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Politics
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Power
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Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Nature
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Science
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
- Henry Adams
Collection: History
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Politics
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Politics
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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.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Sympathy
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Intelligence
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Friends are born, not made.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Friendship
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Friendship
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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.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Friendship
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Intelligence
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He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Politics
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Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Marriage
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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
- Henry Adams
Collection: Teacher
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
- Henry Adams
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
- Henry Adams
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No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
- Henry Adams
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
- Henry Adams
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They know enough who know how to learn.
- Henry Adams
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
- Henry Adams
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
- Henry Adams
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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.
- Henry Adams
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No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
- Henry Adams
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
- Henry Adams
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Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
- Henry Adams
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Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
- Henry Adams
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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
- Henry Adams
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The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
- Henry Adams
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
- Henry Adams
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Intimates are predestined.
- Henry Adams
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American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
- Henry Adams
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A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
- Henry Adams
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
- Henry Adams
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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.
- Henry Adams
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
- Henry Adams
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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.
- Henry Adams
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Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
- Henry Adams
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At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
- Henry Adams
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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
- Henry Adams

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