Henry Brooks Adams, (1838-1918) American Historian Quotes
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself.
Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.
Clover is off her feed
(in reference to the depression of his wife, who subsequently
caused her suicide.. which was deeply painful to him).
American society is a sort of flat, freshwater pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.
[won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 after Adam's death]
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.