About Henry Adams: Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
