A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
Friends are born, not made.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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.
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
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.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Intimates are predestined.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
