While Ross and Cockburn were hastily burning the White House and Department buildings, anxious only to escape, and never sending more than two hundred soldiers beyond Capitol Square, the President, his Cabinet, his generals, and his army were performing movements at which even the American people, though outraged and exasperated beyond endurance, could not but laugh.

— Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes

The proper study of mankind is woman.

— Henry Adams

In the one branch he most needed.

— Henry Adams

Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

— Henry Adams

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

— Henry Adams

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

— Henry Adams

A boy’s will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

— Henry Adams

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.

— Henry Adams

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

— Henry Adams

To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.

— Henry Adams

When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, Only silence is strong, – all the rest is but lies.

— Henry Adams

While Ross and Cockburn were hastily burning the White House and Department buildings, anxious only to escape, and never sending more than two hundred soldiers beyond Capitol Square, the President, his Cabinet, his generals, and his army were performing movements at which even the American people, though outraged and exasperated beyond endurance, could not but laugh.

— Henry Adams

He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.

— Henry Adams

She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

— Henry Adams

The world grew cheap, as worlds must.

— Henry Adams

Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.

— Henry Adams

The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.

— Henry Adams

He could teach his students nothing. He was only educating himself at their cost.

— Henry Adams

Few men have dared to legislate as though eternal peace were at hand, in a world torn by wars and convulsions and drowned in blood; but this was what Jefferson aspired to do. Even in such dangers, he believed that Americans might safely set an example which the Christian world should be led by interest to respect and at length to imitate.

— Henry Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts, but education and politics are two different and often contradictory things.

— Henry Adams

A new friend is always a miracle... One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

— Henry Adams
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