Zitat des Tages von Henry Adams:
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
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.
A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
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 hundred thousand.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
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.
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.