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

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
Image
[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
Henry Adams
Image
Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
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
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
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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
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
Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
Image
An artist's business is only to see.
Henry Adams
Image
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
Henry Adams
Image
One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
Henry Adams
Image
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
Image
The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
Henry Adams
Image
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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