Henry Adams

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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

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

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

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

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

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

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

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.