Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Henry Adams
The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession

Henry Adams
No sand-blast of science had yet skimmed off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling.

Henry Adams
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

Henry Adams
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

Henry Adams
He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception.

Henry Adams
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

Henry Adams
The easier study of geology... suited idle minds as well as though it were history.

Henry Adams
Briefly, chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous.

Henry Adams
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

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

Henry Adams
The facts seemed certain, or at least as certain as other facts; all they needed was explanation.

Henry Adams
The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime.

Henry Adams
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.

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
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 laws of history only repeat the lines of force or thought.

Henry Adams