Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Henry Adams Historian

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Feb 16, 1838
  • Died: Mar 27, 1918

Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.

As a young Harvard graduate, he was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s ambassador in London, a posting that had much influence on the younger man, both through experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a noted political journalist who entertained America’s foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.

In his lifetime, he was best known for his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, a 9-volume work, praised for its literary style, but sometimes criticised for inaccuracy.

His posthumously-published memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize, and went on to be named by The Modern Library as the top English-language nonfiction book of the twentieth century.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

I have written too much history to have faith in it and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

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

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

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

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.

Friends are born, not made.

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

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

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.