Henry Brooks Adams

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 Brooks Adams

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

— Henry Brooks Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks 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 Brooks Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

— Henry Brooks Adams

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

— Henry Brooks Adams

Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

— Henry Brooks Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

— Henry Brooks Adams

Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

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

— Henry Brooks Adams

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

— Henry Brooks Adams