Famous Quotes By Henry Adams

 

1. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
2. Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
3. All experience is an arch, to build upon.
4. American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
5. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
6. Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
7. Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
8. Friends are born, not made.
9. He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
13. Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
14. No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
15. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
16. 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.
17. Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
18. Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
19. Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
20. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
21. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
25. There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.