Henry Adams Quotes

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.

I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

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

During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

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

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

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.

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

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.

They know enough who know how to learn.

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

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.

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

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

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.

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

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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