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.

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The proper study of mankind is woman.

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

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

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

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

Friends are born, not made.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

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.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

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.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.

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.

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.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

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

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

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.

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

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

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.