283 Quotes by Henry Adams

In the one branch he most needed.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman’s slavery was assumed to be for life.

My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can’t myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.

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.

All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people.

A new friend is always a miracle... 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.

The philosopher says – I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers: – No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.