American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Society]

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Taste]

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Teachers and Teaching]

Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Politicians and Politics]

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Politicians and Politics]

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Possibilities]

A friend in power is a friend lost.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Power]

Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [President]

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Liberty]

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Men and Women]

Morality is a private and costly luxury.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Morality]

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Order]

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Facts]

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 Brooks Adams - [Friends and Friendship]

The proper study of mankind is woman.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Humankind]

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Inferiority]

They know enough who know how to learn.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Education]

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [America]

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
~ Henry Brooks Adams - [Chance]