Quote

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Henry Adams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry Adams
Age: 80 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 16
Died: 1918
Died: March 27
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
Mathematician
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Frances Snow Compton
Henry Adams
Literature
Synonyms
Term
Impressionists
Understand
Synonym
Art
Anarchist
Wells
Pessimist
Well
Merely
Take
Terms
Mean
Politics
Impressionist

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
History is only a value of relation.
Henry Adams
Image
One friend in a life-time 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
Image
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
Henry Adams
Image
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams
Image
I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
Image
Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
Henry Adams
Image
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
Image
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
Image
Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
Henry Adams
Image
To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
Henry Adams
Image
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
Henry Adams
Image
Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
Henry Adams
Image
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams
Image
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
Image
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
Image
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry Adams
Image
History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry Adams
Image
It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
Henry Adams
Image
The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
Henry Adams
Image
One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
Henry Adams