Henry Adams (1838–1918,) fully Henry Brooks Adams, was an American historian, journalist, novelist, and educator. He was the author of one of the most distinguished autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Adams was the son of the politician and diplomat Charles Francis Adams, who was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams. Educated at Harvard, Henry Adams acted as his father’s secretary in Washington (1860–61) and England (1861–68) and then worked as a journalist in Washington (1868–70) before teaching medieval and American history at Harvard (1870–77.)
Adams edited the North American Review (1870–76) and wrote two novels, Democracy (1880) and Esther (1884.) He also wrote historical works, including the monumental History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (9 vols., 1870–77,) and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904,) a study of the unity of art and religion in the Middle Ages.
Adams’s posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams (1907,) won the Pulitzer. The Modern Library named it the best English-language non-fiction book in the 20th century.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry Adams
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Words, Writing
The proper study of mankind is woman.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
—Henry Adams
Topics: History
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.
—Henry Adams
Topics: America
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Education
A friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Power, Authority
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Enthusiasm
Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Science, Philosophy, Philosophers
Accident counts for much in companionship, in marriage.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Friendship
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Society
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Intelligence
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Intelligence, Education, Ignorance, Facts
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Living, Order, Habit
Power is poison. It’s effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
—Henry Adams
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.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
The Indian summer of life should be a little sunny and sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone-but never hustled.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Aging
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Chance
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Liberty, Absence
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Men and Women, Women
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Politics
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence—beginning with one’s own.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Potential, Possibilities, Intelligence
In the one branch he most needed
—Henry Adams
Topics: Mathematics
History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
—Henry Adams
Topics: History
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
—Henry Adams
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Doubt, Inferiority, Intelligence
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Youth, Education
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
—Henry Adams
In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
—Henry Adams
A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.
—Henry Adams
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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