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Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. There, whether finished or not, education stopped. The formula, once made, could be but verified.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 162). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

(Theodore) Roosevelt, as every one knew, was always an amusing talker, and had the reputation of being indiscreet...(he) concluded by declaring that war was imminent; that it ought to be stopped; that it could be stopped: “I could do it myself; I could stop it to-morrow!”

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 159). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Manchuria knew every step into war; Japan had completed every preparation; Alexeieff had collected his army and fleet at Port Arthur, mounting his siege guns and laying in enormous stores, ready for the expected attack; from Yokohama to Irkutsk, the whole East was under war conditions; but Europe knew nothing.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 159). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 157). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts. The laws of history only repeat the lines of force or thought. Yet though his will be iron, he cannot help now and then resuming his humanity or simianity in face of a fear.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 157). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

WASHINGTON WAS ALWAYS AMUSING, but in 1900, as in 1800, its chief interest lay in its distance from New York. The movement of New York had become planetary—beyond control—while the task of Washington, in 1900 as in 1800, was to control it. The success of Washington in the past century promised ill for its success in the next.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 150). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Nihilism had no bottom. For thousands of years every philosopher had stood on the shore of this sunless sea, diving for pearls and never finding them. All had seen that, since they could not find bottom, they must assume it.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 148). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

...Roosevelt and Lodge were playing a game in which they were always liable to find the shifty sands of American opinion yield suddenly under their feet. With this game an elderly friend had long before carried acquaintance as far as he wished. There was nothing in it for him but the amusement of the pugilist or acrobat.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it...

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 144). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. The older the mind, the older its complexities, and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 137). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

...man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other...
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 131). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

In conversation La Farge’s mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 128). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Whistler in his art carried the sense of nuance and tone far beyond any point reached by La Farge, or even attempted; but in talk he showed, above or below his color-instinct, a willingness to seem eccentric where no real eccentricity, unless perhaps of temper, existed.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 128). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Only the very young have the right to betray their ignorance or ill-breeding. Elderly people commonly know enough not to betray themselves.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 123). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

A mathematician, linguist, chemist, electrician, engineer, if fortunate might average a value of ten dollars a day in the open market. An administrator, organizer, manager, with mediæval qualities of energy and will, but no education beyond his special branch, would probably be worth at least ten times as much.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 120). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Adams had long ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months’ oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 114). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

A presidential election was to take place in November, and no one showed much interest in the result. The two candidates were singular persons, of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other, only enemies.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 111). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Their faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with education when they got it. Adams did put the question to one of them, and was surprised at the answer: “The degree of Harvard College is worth money to me in Chicago.”


Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 105). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

In spite of President Eliot’s reforms and his steady, generous, liberal support, the system remained costly, clumsy and futile. The university—as far as it was represented by Henry Adams—produced at great waste of time and money results not worth reaching.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 105). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

He frankly acted on the rule that a teacher, who knew nothing of his subject, should not pretend to teach his scholars what he did not know, but should join them in trying to find the best way of learning it.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 104). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

The French, like true artists, always regarded war as one of the fine arts. Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 100). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Grant’s administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency, but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency. What it wanted, it did not know; probably a system that would work, and men who could work it; but it found neither.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 97). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Between the Executive and the Legislature, citizens could have no Rights; they were at the mercy of Power. They had created the Court to protect them from unlimited Power... Adams wanted to save the independence of the Court at least for his lifetime, and could not conceive that the Executive should wish to overthrow it.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 96). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or historians, for it lies always under suspicion. Here was a mystery, and as usual, the chief mystery was the means of making sure that any mystery existed.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 94). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 92). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

A single word with Grant satisfied him that...the fewer words he risked, the better. Thus far in life he had met with but one man of the same intellectual or unintellectual type—Garibaldi. Of the two, Garibaldi seemed to him a trifle the more intellectual, but, in both, the intellect counted for nothing; only the energy counted.
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 92). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

...the Senators made no secret of saying with senatorial frankness that Grant’s nominations betrayed his intent as plainly as they betrayed his incompetence. A great soldier might be a baby politician.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 91). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Grant represented order. He was a great soldier, and the soldier always represented order. He might be as partisan as he pleased, but a general who had organized and commanded half a million or a million men in the field, must know how to administer.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 90). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

All parties were mixed up and jumbled together in a sort of tidal slack-water. The Government resembled Adams himself in the matter of education. All that had gone before was useless, and some of it was worse.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams (p. 88). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.