Henry Adams Quotations

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

They know enough who know how to learn.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

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

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

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.

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

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

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

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

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

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

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.

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.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

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.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

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.

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

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.

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.

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.

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

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

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

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

A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.

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.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.

It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people

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.

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.

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.

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

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.

Intimates are predestined.

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.

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

Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

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.

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

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.

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

In the one branch he most needed

The proper study of mankind is woman.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.

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.

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.

The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.

The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

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.