Quotes from Henry Brooks Adams

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

It's a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world's greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

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

He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

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

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.

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

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

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

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