Henry Adams
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.
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.
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.Collection: Suicide
A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.Collection: Rap
The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.Collection: Party
Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.Collection: Succeed
Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.Collection: Organization
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.Collection: Struggle
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.Collection: Mind
A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.Collection: Useless
Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.Collection: Marriage
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.Collection: Friendship
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.Collection: Suicide
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.Collection: Self
I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.Collection: Tired
My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Mind
Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: Giving
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.Collection: Book
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.Collection: Church
The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every.Collection: Virginia
Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.Collection: Psychology
From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.Collection: Summer
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.Collection: Truth
The mind resorts to reason for want of training.Collection: Mind
As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.Collection: Play
In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.Collection: Cutting
Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.Collection: Faith
Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Honesty
Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.Collection: Saint
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.Collection: Truth
The world is coming to an end in 1950.Collection: Technology
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.Collection: Believe
Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.Collection: Order
Man loves most that which is his own.Collection: Love
In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.Collection: Mother
Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.Collection: Law
A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.Collection: Children
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.Collection: Teaching
Good men do the most harm.Collection: Men
In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.Collection: Men
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.Collection: Sex
As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.Collection: Play
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardlyCollection: Years
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.Collection: Love
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.Collection: Real