Talk:Henry Adams

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

• Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

• Henry James chews more than he bites off.

• 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.

• It is impossible to underrate human intelligence— beginning with one's own.

• Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

• No historian can take part with— or against— the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

• No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

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

• Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

• Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

• The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

• The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

• There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.