Henry Adams quotes

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

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

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

Friends are born, not made.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

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, but never hustled.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

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 mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

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

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

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, but never hustled.

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

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

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.

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

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.