Quote #47

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

More from Henry Adams

  1. There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
  2. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
  3. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
  4. Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
  5. Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
  6. No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
  7. No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
  8. No historian can take part with- or against- the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fa…

All Henry Adams quotes