Henry Adams

“It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.”

“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.”

“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.”

“The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.”

“Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.”

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

“Intimates are predestined.”

“The proper study of mankind is woman.”

“At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.”

“We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.”

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

“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 hundr...”

“No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”

“No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”

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

“Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”