283 Quotes by Henry Adams

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] "I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines [...] We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.

Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.

In the one branch he most needed

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris] [Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.