Henry Adams Quotes

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Henry Adams

Friends are born, not made.

Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams