Henry Brooks Adams Quotes

•  Morality is a private and costly luxury.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Intimates are predestined.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• All experience is an arch, to build upon.

  Henry Brooks Adams

  Topics in Experience

• He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

  Henry Brooks Adams

  Topics in Politics

• A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• 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 Brooks Adams

• Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

  Henry Brooks Adams

• I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

  Henry Brooks Adams

Henry Brooks Adams (63)

Birth:	16th February, 1838
Death:	27th March, 1918
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Historian, Journalist, Novelist

About

Henry Brooks Adams was born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was an American historian, journalist and novelist. He educated at Harvard University and Humboldt University of Berlin. In his lifetime, he was best known for his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, a 9-volume work, praised for its literary style. His posthumously published memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the top English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century. He was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalism. He was the anonymous London correspondent for the New York Times. He wrote several novels include: Democracy and Esther. In 1870, he was appointed professor of medieval history at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877. In 1894, he was elected president of the American Historical Association.

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