Quote

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

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
World
War
Political
Conscientiously
Character
Hanged
Good
Acted
Always
Harm
Men
Worse
Think
Revolution
Thinking
Fine

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
Image
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
Image
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Henry Adams
Image
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
Image
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
Image
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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 proper study of mankind is woman.
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
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry Adams
Image
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
Henry Adams
Image
I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
Henry Adams
Image
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
Image
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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
You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
Henry Adams
Image
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
Henry Adams
Image
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams