Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry Adams

• A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
• Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
• All experience is an arch, to build upon.
• American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
• Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
• Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
• Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
• Friends are born, not made.
• He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
• 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.
• I have written too much history to have faith in it and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
• It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
• Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
• No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
• 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.
• Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
• Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
• Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
• 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 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.
• The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
• There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.