Henry Brooks adams

“A friend in power is a friend lost.”

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

“American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.”

“As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms.  Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome.  There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore.”

“Friends are born, not made.”

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

“One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three hardly possible.  Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”

“They know enough who know how to learn.”