He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without … - Henry Adams

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

He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius; selection between them is the highest science; their mass is the highest educator. Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God.