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

December 7, 2025
What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.
December 24, 2025
Tories, in short, are atrophied Englishmen, lacking certain moral and intellectual reflexes.
August 30, 2025
00:57
Since a rational creature cannot be supposed, when free, to put himself in subjection to another for his own harm
Page 55 of 122