Quotes Library

October 30, 2025

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

Henry Adams (1838–1918), American historian, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), in The Cynic’s Lexicon, Jonathon Green, ed. (London: 1986), p.2

To what systematic hatreds do you subscribe? And to what ends? Can such ends be “flipped”, so that you can instead be part of some faction for good?

The son of a congressman, grandson of one president and great grandson of another, Henry Adams had a ringside seat on things political all his life. His comment should not be dismissed out of hand.


More Quotes

July 20, 2025
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.
December 4, 2025
Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
March 14, 2025
[Of political life] The hatreds which sound so real when you read the words, which look so true when you see their scornful attitudes
Page 33 of 122