Alismcg’s Reviews > Democracy / Esther / Mont Saint Michel and Chartres / The Education of Henry Adams > Status Update

"For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery."

"That , two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous." 😂

___"The Education of Henry Adams"

"...as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political instinct, without waiting further experiment, —as he took for granted that arsenic poisoned, —the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost. "

"This was the boy's first lesson in practical politics, and a sharp one; not that he troubled himself with moral doubts, but that he learned the nature of a flagrantly corrupt political bargain in which he was too good to take part but not too good to take profit."

"Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit—the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe."

"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore the ideally free individual is responsible only to himself.This principle is the philosophical foundation of anarchism, and ... is fatal to all society and is especially hostile to the State."

And on that note... I am about to begin, at last , that great classic—for which I had selected this volume—"The Education of Henry Adams"

"People who suffer beyond the formulas of expression, — who are crushed into silence , and beyond pain, — want no display of emotion, — no bleeding heart, — no weeping at the foot of the Cross, — no hysterics, — no phrases ! They want to see God, and to know that he is watching over his own. "

"...you or any other lost soul, could, if you cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a sense divine that would make that world more intelligible, and would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depth of feeling which she shows here...but what is still more convincing, he could, at will, in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive of his own." _Chartres

"An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended—the measure of his genius...No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it..."

Reading the 3rd title in the volume... absolutely horrible 🤣 , thinking "there must be something of value here".