Henry Brooks Adams

Famous quotes containing the words henry brooks adams, brooks adams, henry, brooks and/or adams:

    “If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one’s self a part of it. If virtue won’t answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington’s day as it is now, and always will be.”
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.
    —Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)