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  ...early, in the stress of civil war, to hold his tongue, and to help make the political machine run somehow, since it could never be made to run well, he would not bother Hay with theoretical objections which were every day fretting him in practical forms. Hay's chance lay in patience and good-temper till the luck should turn, and to him the only object was time; but as political education the point seemed vital to Adams, who never liked shutting his eyes or denying an evident fact. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.   but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things. In this case, the contradiction seemed crude.
With Hay's politics, at home or abroad, Adams had nothing whatever to do. Hay belonged to the New York school, like Abram Hewitt, Evarts, W. C. Whitney, Samuel J. Tilden -- men who played the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of the usual player, and...   Adams, Henry Brooks

Source: HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels, chapter 24, p. 373 . Originally published in 1906.He was the son of Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of John Adams. · Excerpt from The Education of Henry Adams · This quote is about politics · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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