Henry Adams

Henry Brooks Adams (16 February 1838 – 27 March 1918) was an American historian, journalist, novelist and educator. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams Sr.

Quotes

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.
- A History of the United States of America During the First Administration of James Madison (1890), Vol. II, Ch. VI: Meeting of the Twelfth Congress; 1921 edition, p. 123

I disagree with my brother Charles and Theodore Roosevelt. 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. These facts have nothing to do with the case and should not have been allowed to interfere with just penalties. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
- As quoted in American Heritage (December 1955), p. 44

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
- Letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr., London, 11 April 1862. In J. C. Levenson, E. Samuels, C. Vandersee and V. Hopkins Winner (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams: 1858-1868 (1982), 1: 290.

I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
- Letter to Elizabeth Cameron (22 January 1899), in J. C. Levinson et al. eds., The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume IV: 1892–1899 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988), p. 670

We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. The world, if it exists, feels exactly in the same way towards us, and cares not one straw whether we exist or not. Philosophy has never got beyond this point. There are but two schools: one turns the world onto me; the other turns me onto the world; and the result is the same. The so-called me is a very, very small and foolish puppy-dog, but it is all that exists, and it tries all its life to get a little bigger by enlarging its energies, and getting dollars or getting friends.
- Letter to Elizabeth Cameron (13 May 1905), in Worthington C. Ford ed., Letters of Henry Adams, Volume 2: 1892–1918 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), p. 451

Democracy: An American Novel (1880)

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her good.
- Ch. I, first lines

Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right.
- Madeleine Lee in Ch. IV

I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee!
- Nathan Gore in Ch. IV

I have got so far as to lose the distinction between right and wrong. Isn't that the first step in politics?
- Madeleine Lee in Ch. VIII

She regarded men as creatures made for women to dispose of.
- About Madeleine, in Ch. XI

...any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to.
- Ch. XI

The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil, between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic.
- Madeleine Lee assessing Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe in Ch. XIII

Esther: A Novel (1884)

In this atmosphere of charity, where all faiths were alike and all professions joined hands, the church and the world became one.
- On a children's hospital, Ch. III

Wharton was captivated by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested.
- Referring to Catherine Brooke, Ch. III

An artist must be man, woman and demi-god.
- Mr. Wharton in Ch. IV

I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.
- Mr. Wharton in Ch. IV

One is a saint or one is not; every man can choose the career that suits him; but to be saint and sinner at the same time requires singular ingenuity.
- Ch. IV

This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.
- Ch. VII

Mystery for mystery science beats religion hollow. I can't open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in his church.
- George Strong in Ch. VII

Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
- George Strong in Ch. VII

Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timid and half-hearted faith. He would rather have jumped at once to Strong's pure denial, than yield an inch to the argument that a mystery was to be paltered with because it could not be explained.
- About the Rev. Stephen Hazard, in Ch. VIII

Never was the Church blessed with a stranger ally than this freest of free thinkers, who looked at churches very much as he would have looked at a layer of extinct oysters in a buried mud-bank. Strong's notion was that since the Church continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. Since men and women were here, idiotic and purposeless as they might be, they had what they chose to call a right to amuse themselves in their own way, and if this way made some happy without hurting others, Strong was ready enough to help.
- Ch. VIII

I am never afraid of pure atheism; it is the flabby kind of sentimental deism that annoys me, because it is as slippery as air.
- The Rev. Stephen Hazard in Ch. VIII

She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to tell her a story which she longed to understand.
- Esther Dudley's reaction to Niagara Falls, in Ch. IX

...the huge church [...] was thundering its gospel under her eyes.
To have Niagara for a rival is no joke. Hazard spoke with no such authority; and Esther's next idea was one of wonder how, after listening here, any preacher could have the confidence to preach again. "What do they know about it?" she asked herself. "Which of them can tell a story like this, or a millionth part of it?"
- Ch. IX

As for broken hearts, no self-respecting young woman shows such an ornament at any well regulated breakfast-table; they are kept in dark drawers and closets like other broken furniture.
- Ch. IX

She broke in with a question that staggered him.
"Does your idea mean that the next world is a sort of great reservoir of truth, and that what is true in us just pours into it like raindrops?"
"Well!" said he, alarmed and puzzled: "the figure is not perfectly correct, but the idea is a little of that kind."
"After all I wonder whether that may not be what Niagara has been telling me!" said Esther, and she spoke with an outburst of energy that made Strong's blood run cold.
- Esther Dudley and George Strong in Ch. IX

Some people are made with faith. I am made without it.
- Esther Dudley in Ch. X

As for myself, if I could have removed my doubts by so simple a step as that of becoming an atheist, I should have done it, no matter what scandal or punishment had followed. I studied the subject thoroughly, and found that for one doubt removed, another was raised, only to reach at last a result more inconceivable than that reached by the church, and infinitely more hopeless besides. What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put a greater one in its place, and throw away your only hope besides? The atheists offer no sort of bargain for one's soul. Their scheme is all loss and no gain. At last both they and I come back to a confession of ignorance; the only difference between us is that my ignorance is joined with a faith and hope.
- The Rev. Stephen Hazard in Ch. X

"Do you really believe in the resurrection of the body?" she asked
"Of course I do!" replied Hazard stiffly.
"To me it seems a shocking idea. I despise and loathe myself, and yet you thrust self at me from every corner of the church as though I loved and admired it. All religion does nothing but pursue me with self even into the next world."
- Esther Dudley and Stephen Hazard in Ch. X

Esther looked at him with an expression that would have been a smile if it had not been infinitely dreary and absent; then she said, simply and finally:
"But George, I don't love you, I love him."
- Ch. X, the last lines of the novel

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919)

Energy had a way of coming and going in phases of intensity much more mysterious than the energy itself.
The sun, according to Tyndall, wasted into space practically all its energy except an imperceptible portion that happened to fall on the earth; but even this portion was not utilizable for human purposes [...] without assistance.
Ice, water, and vapor were phases sharply distinct. So the imperceptible portion of solar energy which fell on the earth, reappeared by some mysterious process, to an infinitely minute measure, in the singular form of intensity known as Vital Energy, and disappeared by a sudden and violent change of phase known as death.
Man had always flattered himself that he knew — or was about to know — something [...] but he invariably found [...] that the more he knew the less he understood. [...] He knew nothing at all ! No one knew anything
- The Problem, pages 148-149
Compared with the superficial and self-complacent optimism which seems to veneer the surface of society, the frequent and tragic outbursts of physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, and sociological socialists announcing the End of the World, surpass all that could be conceived as a Natural product of the time. The notes of warning verge on the grotesque; it is hysterically solemn; [...] a natural shock might easily turn it into a panic
- The Problem, pages 180 - 182

Misattributed

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 7

Quotes about Adams

Henry Adams had prophesied that the awakening would come before 1940. He missed the year by a trifle. His historic sense was sound.
- Mary Ritter Beard, America Through Women's Eyes (1933)

He used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's Confessions, but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity.
- Adams about himself writing under the name of his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, in the Editor's Preface to the 1918 edition of The Education of Henry Adams (September 1918)

Adams's skill as a literary craftsman has rarely been excelled by anyone writing in the English language, and certainly by no American historian. Any historian who ventures into territory where Henry Adams trod does so with either trepidation or foolhardy courage—lest one offend not only Clio, the muse of History, but also Calliope, the muse of Epic Poetry.
- Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1976), p. vii

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