Quotes from Henry Adams

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

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

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

Intimates are predestined.

Even in America, 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.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

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

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable.

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.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

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.

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

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.

Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.

Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage.