Quote

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

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
Government
Fifth
Work
Internals
Men
Internal
Task
Thousands
Tasks
Rate
Become
Controlling

More quotes by 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
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Henry Adams
Image
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
Image
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry Adams
Image
In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams
Image
All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people
Henry Adams
Image
Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
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
Image
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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
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
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
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry Adams
Image
American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
Henry Adams
Image
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
Image
The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
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
Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
Henry Adams