Intimates are predestined.

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

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.

- Henry Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

- Henry Adams

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

- Henry Adams

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

- Henry Adams

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.

- Henry Adams

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

- Henry Adams

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

- Henry Adams

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

- Henry Adams

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

- Henry Adams

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

- Henry Adams