Henry Adams Quotes About Politics

• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

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  Henry Adams

  1585

• It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

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  Henry Adams

  Men  

  American Heritage magazine, December 1955.

  279

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

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  Henry Adams

  Men  

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.101, Booklassic

  305

• Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

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  Henry Adams

  Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Massachusetts Historical Society (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams: 1868-1885”

  1299

• He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

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  Henry Adams

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.445, BookRix

  3347

• You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!

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  Henry Adams

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1494, Open Road Media

  316

• The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.

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  Henry Adams

  4830

• As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

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  Henry Adams

  3297

• There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.

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  Henry Adams

  Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels (1992). “Henry Adams, Selected Letters”, p.8, Harvard University Press

  1249

• 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 powerhouses. 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.

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  Henry Adams

  Men  

  Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Adams (2016). “Great American Lives: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, and The Education of Henry Adams”, p.1701, Open Road Media

  971

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

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  Henry Adams

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 17 (1907)

  1646

• A friend in power is a friend lost.

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  Henry Adams

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 7 (1907)

  1852

• Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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  Henry Adams

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 24 (1907)

  4862

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

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  Henry Adams

  374

• If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.

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  Henry Adams

  Henry Adams (2015). “Democracy”, p.82, Sheba Blake Publishing

  4379

• No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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  Henry Adams

  Men  

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 31 (1907)

  2259

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