Henry Adams Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

History has never regarded itself as a science of statistics. It was the Science of Vital Energy in relation with time; and of late this radiating center of life has been steadily tending, — together with every form of physical and mechanical energy, — toward mathematical expression.

Henry Adams
The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

Henry Adams
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Henry Adams
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.

Henry Adams
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
An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

Henry Adams
The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.

Henry Adams
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.

Henry Adams
A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should.

Henry Adams
One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.

Henry Adams
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
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
The future of Thought and therefore of History lies in the hands of physicists, and therefore the future historian must seek his education in the world of mathematical physics.

Henry Adams
The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or thought.

Henry Adams