283 Quotes by Henry 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.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.

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.

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.