One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
Henry AdamsOne friend in a life-time 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 AdamsEvery 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 AdamsMr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.
Henry AdamsFrom cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
Henry AdamsIt is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
Henry AdamsChurch and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
Henry AdamsThe less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
Henry AdamsAfter Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.
Henry AdamsPolitics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.
Henry AdamsIn the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
Henry AdamsHistory is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
Henry AdamsThe social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession
Henry AdamsPolitics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry AdamsPeople here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
Henry AdamsHistory is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry AdamsMy own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.
Henry AdamsHistory will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry AdamsFor reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry AdamsThe historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
Henry AdamsYou can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!
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 AdamsModern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
Henry AdamsAnalogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.
Henry AdamsNothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.
Henry AdamsThe sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
Henry AdamsIf Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.
Henry AdamsYou 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 AdamsThe habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Henry AdamsThe Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.
Henry AdamsCharles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.
Henry AdamsTo my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
Henry Adams