Henry Brooks Adams (16 February 1838 - 27 March 1918) was a U.S. historian, journalist and novelist; great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams,
Sourced
- For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
- Democracy (1880) First lines
Attributed
- A friend in power is a friend lost.
- A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
- Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
- Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage.
- Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
- Friends are born, not made.
- It is impossible to underrate human intelligence— beginning with one's own.
- Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
- No historian can take part with— or against— the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
- No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
- No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
- No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
- Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert 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.
- Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
- Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
- Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
- 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.
- The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
- What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
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