Top 222 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Adams

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian Henry Adams.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents.

American - Historian | February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918

Source: Wikipedia

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.

Henry Adams

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

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

Henry Adams

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Intimates are predestined.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams

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

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

Henry Adams

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

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.

Henry Adams

Friends are born, not made.

Henry Adams

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

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

Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Henry Adams

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

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

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

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

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Henry Adams

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Henry Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams

Top 222 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Adams

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