1838 – 1918, American Historian
A friend in power is a friend lost.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Power]
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Teachers and Teaching]
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Liberty]
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Chance]
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Society]
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.
Henry Brooks Adams – [America]
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Order]
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Taste]
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence — beginning with one's own.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Possibilities]
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Morality]
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Inferiority]
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Words]
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Facts]
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 Brooks Adams – [Friends and Friendship]
Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Politicians and Politics]
Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Henry Brooks Adams – [President]
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Politicians and Politics]
The proper study of mankind is woman.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Humankind]
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Men and Women]
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Brooks Adams – [Education]