Henry Adams Quotes

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

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

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.

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.

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

Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

The 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.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

Good men do the most harm.

They know enough who know how to learn.

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.