Quotes from Henry Adams

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

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

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

A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Man loves most that which is his own.

Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

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

The proper study of mankind is woman.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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.

The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

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