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.
Henry AdamsNature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.
Henry AdamsThe less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
Henry AdamsJust as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.
Henry AdamsThe American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.
Henry Adams