Henry Adams Quotes

161 quotes in 2037 categories

• Friends are born, not made.
• A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
• 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,…
• Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
• Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
• Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
• 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…
• 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.
• Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
• There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
• All experience is an arch, to build upon.
• Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
• It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
• No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
• Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
• American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
• 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…

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