Henry Adams

In the one branch he most needed

— Henry Adams

Friends are born, not made.

— Henry Adams

Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.

— Henry Adams

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

— Henry Adams

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

— Henry Adams

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

— Henry Adams

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

— Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

— Henry Adams

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

— Henry Adams

As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.

— Henry Adams

I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.

— Henry Adams

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

— Henry Adams

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

— Henry Adams

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force…

— Henry Adams

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred…

— Henry Adams

“General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.”

— Henry Adams

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the…

— Henry Adams

“The world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought education in order to adjust…

— Henry Adams

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

— Henry Adams

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.

— Henry Adams

The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the…

— Henry Adams

It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the…

— Henry Adams

Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney…

— Henry Adams

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty…

— Henry Adams

Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to…

— Henry Adams

A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly…

— Henry Adams

The President may indeed in one respect resemble the commander of an army in peace, but in another and more essential sense…

— Henry Adams

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator…

— Henry Adams

There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the…

— Henry Adams

Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this--that whatever they…

— Henry Adams

“the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a…

— Henry Adams

I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called…

— Henry Adams

[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor…

— Henry Adams

“Adams's diplomatic victory was Napoleonic in its magnitude and completeness, Even Caulaincourt, whom he overthrew, good-naturedly congratulated him after he had succeeded,against…

— Henry Adams

“One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the…

— Henry Adams

“Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to…

— Henry Adams

The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why…

— Henry Adams