Henry Adams

Who was Henry Adams?

Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.

As a young Harvard graduate, he was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s ambassador in London, a posting that had much influence on the younger man, both through experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the war, he became a noted political journalist, who entertained America’s foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.

In his lifetime, he was best known for his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, a 9-volume work, praised for its literary style, but sometimes criticised for inaccuracy.

His posthumously-published memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize, and went on to be named by The Modern Library as the top English-language nonfiction book of the twentieth century.

Famous Quotes:

• No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
• Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
• Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
• American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
• They know enough who know how to learn.
• A friend in power is a friend lost.
• As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
• Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.