Henry Adams Quotes - Page 2

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

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

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

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

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.

By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

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

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

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.

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

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

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

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

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.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.