Henry B. Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

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.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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

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

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

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

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Friends are born, not made.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

A friend in power is a friend lost.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

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.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

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

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

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

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Intimates are predestined.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

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.

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

The proper study of mankind is woman.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

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.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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

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

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

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

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