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

— Henry 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 Adams

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual Furness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sacred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on Sebring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

— Henry Adams

Philosophy. . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

— Henry Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

— Henry Adams

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

— Henry Adams

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

— Henry Adams