Henry Adams

“Morality is a private and costly luxury.”

“I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.”

“American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.”

“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”

“The proper study of mankind is woman.”

“Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.”

“The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.”

“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.”

“The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession — such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents — it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life.”

“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.”

“Friends are born, not made.”

“The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.”

“For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.”

“המורה משפיע לדורות, לעולם לא ידע עד היכן השפעתו מגעת.”

“כתבתי יותר מדי ספרי היסטוריה מכדי שאאמין בהם. אם מישהו רוצה לחלוק עליי, אני מוכן ומזומן להסכים עמו.”

“הפוליטיקה הייתה מאז ומתמיד ארגון שיטתי של שנאה.”

“פילוסופיה: תשובות לא מובנות לבעיות חסרות פתרון.”

“איש אינו אוהב להעמיד במבחן את תבונתו או את אמונתו, במיוחד אם הוא עצמו מטיל בהן ספק.”

“האדם מהווה אטום סמוי המנסה תמיד להתאחד עם אלוהים.”

“חופש מוחלט משמעו חוסר מעצורים; אחריות משמעה הגבלה עצמית.”