As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry AdamsNothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry AdamsNo 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.
Henry AdamsA society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry AdamsThe first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.
Henry Adams