Henry Brooks Adams
» America » “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.”
» Chance » “Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.”
» Education » “They know enough who know how to learn.”
» Facts » “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
» Humankind » “The proper study of mankind is woman.”
» Inferiority » “No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.”
» Liberty » “Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.”
» Men and Women » “The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”
» Morality » “Morality is a private and costly luxury.”
» Philosophers and Philosophy » “Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”
» Politicians and Politics » “Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
» Politicians and Politics » “Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
» Possibilities » “It is impossible to underrate human intelligence — beginning with one’s own.”
» Power » “A friend in power is a friend lost.”
» President » “Power is poison. It’s effect on Presidents had always been tragic.”
» Society » “American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.”
» Taste » “Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.”
» Teachers and Teaching » “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
