283 Quotes by Henry Adams

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

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

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

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame...

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly