A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
– Henry B. Adams
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
– Henry B. Adams
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
– Henry B. Adams
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
– Henry B. Adams
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 B. Adams
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
– Henry B. Adams
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
– Henry B. Adams
Friends are born, not made.
– Henry B. Adams
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
– Henry B. Adams
In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
– Henry B. Adams
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
– Henry B. Adams
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
– Henry B. Adams
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
– Henry B. Adams
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
– Henry B. Adams
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
– Henry B. Adams
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
– Henry B. Adams
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
– Henry B. Adams
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 B. Adams
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
– Henry B. Adams
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
– Henry B. Adams
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
– Henry B. Adams
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
– Henry B. Adams
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
– Henry B. Adams
The proper study of mankind is woman.
– Henry B. Adams
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
– Henry B. Adams
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
– Henry B. Adams
They know enough who know how to learn.
– Henry B. Adams
Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
– Henry B. Adams
You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!