Quote

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

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
Power
Course
Scientific
May
Situation
Forces
Statesman
Without
Rich
Changing
Elevators
Every
Church
Artists
Disappeared
Long
Force
Authority
Statesmen
Men
Living
Cutting
Literary
Artist
Least
Heads
Social
Courses
Corporations

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
Henry Adams
Image
What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.
Henry Adams
Image
Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
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
A friend in power is a friend lost.
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
In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
Henry Adams
Image
History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
Henry Adams
Image
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
Henry Adams
Image
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 Adams
Image
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
Image
No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Henry Adams
Image
In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
Henry Adams
Image
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
Image
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Adams
Image
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
Henry Adams
Image
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
Image
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
Image
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
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