"Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence."
Read quote
10 likes
Quote collection
Henry Adams quotes (page 3 of 11)
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea."
Read quote
9 likes
"Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit."
Read quote
9 likes
"At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter."
Read quote
9 likes
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."
Read quote
9 likes
"A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless."
Read quote
9 likes
"Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends."
Read quote
9 likes
"The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong."
Read quote
8 likes
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
Read quote
8 likes
"Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."
Read quote
8 likes
"History is only a catalogue of the forgotten."
Read quote
8 likes
"Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned."
Read quote
8 likes
"You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!"
Read quote
8 likes
"A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians."
Read quote
8 likes
"American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it."
Read quote
8 likes
"Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile."
Read quote
8 likes
"The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts."
Read quote
8 likes
"Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
Read quote
8 likes