Quote

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

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
Feelings
Bottom
Two
Constitution
Seems
Pride
Things
Seem
Constitutions
Strange
Continual
Politics
Tendency
Family
Tendencies
Running
Towards

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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
One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
Image
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.
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
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
Henry Adams
Image
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
Image
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
Henry Adams
Image
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams
Image
A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
Image
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry Adams
Image
From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
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
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
Image
A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
Henry Adams
Image
My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.
Henry Adams
Image
The proper study of mankind is woman.
Henry Adams
Image
If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
Henry Adams