Quotes by Henry Brooks Adams

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.”

“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”

“Friends are born, not made.”

“You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on ones nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.”

“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.”

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit”

“In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.”

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”

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

“The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin”

“In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man”

“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with ones own”

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

“Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels”

“What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.”

“A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.”

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

“Intimates are predestined”

“The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men”

“When will the public cease to insult the teachers calling with empty flattery? When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings?”