Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adamswas an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1838
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
education mind purpose
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
teacher doubt mind
Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
education choices mind
Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
water mind calm
Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.
training mind want
The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
mind tragedy study
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
truth mind would-be
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.
mind president poison
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent 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; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
teacher giving parent
A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
philosophy order medicine
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
few means slippery
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
man
A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
politics systematic
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
struggle men modern
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.