Quote

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

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
Profession
Serve
Service
Dies
History
Flea
Fleas
Irritated

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
Henry Adams
Image
That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true work and whiskey were his stimulants work was a form of vice but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
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
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
Image
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams
Image
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
Henry Adams
Image
One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
Henry Adams
Image
Society is immoral and immortal it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
Henry Adams
Image
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Henry Adams
Image
As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry Adams
Image
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
Henry Adams
Image
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
Image
As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
Henry Adams
Image
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
Image
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
Image
A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
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
People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
Henry Adams
Image
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
Henry Adams
Image
The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
Henry Adams