No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry B. Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry B. Adams

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 B. Adams

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry B. Adams

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry B. Adams

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry B. Adams

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry B. Adams

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Henry B. Adams

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry B. Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry B. Adams

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Henry B. Adams

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Henry B. Adams

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
Henry B. Adams

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Henry B. Adams

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.
Henry B. 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.
Henry B. Adams

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry B. Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.
Henry B. Adams

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry B. Adams

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