HENRY ADAMS

(Henry Brooks Adams)


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Henry Adams

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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Henry Adams

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
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Henry Adams

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
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Henry Adams

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
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Henry Adams

Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents had always been tragic; chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bar the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
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Henry Adams

The Secretary of State has always stood as much alone as the historian. Required to look far ahead and around him, he measures forces unknown to party managers, and has found Congress more or less hostile since Congress first sat.
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Henry Adams

The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore ... Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State ...
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Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.
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Henry Adams

The attempt to treat politics as a branch of the profession of law [has] the disadvantage of refining issues to a point which no large society could comprehend.
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Henry Adams

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
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One fascinating thing about this quotation is the date. It would be the next 150 years where the great scientific leaps would take place. There was no inkling of computers or nuclear weapons.

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Henry Adams
© William Notman (1826–1891)
Henry Adams
  • Born: February 16, 1838
  • Died: March 27, 1918
  • Nationality: American
  • Profession: Historian
Biography

Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. Presidents.

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Will Durant, Rick Perlstein, Christopher Lasch, Lord Acton, Barbara Tuchman, Daniel J. Boorstin, James Truslow Adams, Howard Zinn, Carter G. Woodson, Geoffrey C. Ward