The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong. Henry Adams More Quotes by Henry Adams More Quotes From Henry Adams [P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction. Henry Adams squares moon science History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough. Henry Adams tangled enough may The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women. Henry Adams study ignorance teaching Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other. Henry Adams fighting soul-and-body men A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians. Henry Adams definitions want history 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. Henry Adams honesty trying history The mind resorts to reason for want of training. Henry Adams training mind want Henry James chews more than he bites off. Henry Adams bites Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops. Henry Adams influence eternity teacher Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself. Henry Adams ignoring-facts liberty responsibility I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist. Henry Adams literature mean art I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination. Henry Adams hate imagination ideas The President may indeed in one respect resemble the commander of an army in peace, but in another and more essential sense he resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek. He must sooner or later be convinced that a perpetual calm is as little to his purpose as a perpetual hurricane, and that without headway the ship can arrive nowhere. Henry Adams army president sea The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture. Henry Adams coarse delight photograph Politics is simply the organization of hatreds. Henry Adams organization hatred The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church. Henry Adams servant century church The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man. Henry Adams simple complicated men Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress. Henry Adams progress democracy men Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. Henry Adams clothes ego order From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys. Henry Adams summer country lying
