Henry Adams Quotes

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.

By Henry Adams

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

By Henry Adams

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

By Henry Adams

Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

By Henry Adams

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

By Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

In the one branch he most needed

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.

By Henry Adams

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.

By Henry Adams

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

By Henry Adams

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

By Henry Adams

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.

By Henry Adams

Whatever happens at all happens as it should thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely.

By Henry Adams

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

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.

By Henry Adams

The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.

By Henry Adams

One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

By Henry Adams

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

By Henry Adams

Friends are born, not made.

By Henry Adams

Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage.

By Henry Adams

A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops.

By Henry Adams

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

By Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

By Henry Adams