Henry Adams Order Quotations

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

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

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

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.

[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.