Top 160 Henry Adams Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, Only silence is strong, – all the rest is but lies.”

— Henry Adams

102. “I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.”

— Henry Adams

103. “Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.”

— Henry Adams

104. “His brothers were the type; he was the variation.”

— Henry Adams

105. “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.”

— Henry Adams

106. “Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.”

— Henry Adams

107. “Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.”

— Henry Adams

108. “The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.”

— Henry Adams

109. “History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.”

— Henry Adams

110. “The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.”

— Henry Adams

111. “The mind resorts to reason for want of training.”

— Henry Adams

112. “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.”

— Henry Adams

113. “The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.”

— Henry Adams

114. “For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.”

— Henry Adams

115. “Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.”

— Henry Adams

116. “Nothing is easier to teach than historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.”

— Henry Adams

117. “That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.”

— Henry Adams

118. “We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.”

— Henry Adams

119. “The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.”

— Henry Adams

120. “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.”

— Henry Adams

121. “Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”

— Henry Adams

122. “Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.”

— Henry Adams

123. “If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.”

— Henry Adams

124. “Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.”

— Henry Adams

125. “She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.”

— Henry Adams

126. “If one shed tears, they must be shed on one’s pillow.”

— Henry Adams

127. “General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.”

— Henry Adams

128. “The world can absorb only doses of truth,” he said; “too much would kill it.” One sought education in order to adjust the dose.”

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

131. “While Ross and Cockburn were hastily burning the White House and Department buildings, anxious only to escape, and never sending more than two hundred soldiers beyond Capitol Square, the President, his Cabinet, his generals, and his army were performing movements at which even the American people, though outraged and exasperated beyond endurance, could not but laugh.”

— Henry Adams

132. “In the one branch he most needed.”

— Henry Adams

133. “Washington was no politician as we understand the word,” replied Ratcliffe abruptly. “He stood outside of politics. The thing couldn’t be done today. The people don’t like that sort of royal airs.”

— Henry Adams

134. “These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.”

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

137. “In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.”

— Henry Adams

138. “To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.”

— Henry Adams

139. “The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.”

— Henry Adams

140. “Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.”

— Henry Adams

141. “The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.”

— Henry Adams

142. “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.”

— Henry Adams

143. “The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.”

— Henry Adams

144. “As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.”

— Henry Adams

145. “Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.”

— Henry Adams

146. “Laplace would have found it child’s-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself.”

— Henry Adams

147. “There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.”

— Henry Adams

148. “An artist’s business is only to see.”

— Henry Adams

149. “He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence – of talking without meaning – is never effaced.”

— Henry Adams

150. “My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can’t myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.”

— Henry Adams