You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger....... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry B. Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was,... or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant because he was archaic and should have... lived in a cave and worn skins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char...acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alicia Huberman: Look, I'll make it easy for you. The time has come when you must tell me that you have a wife and two adorable ch...ildren, and this madness between us can't go on any longer. T.R. Devlin: I bet you've heard that line often enough. Alicia: Right below the belt every time. Oh that isn't fair, Dev. Devlin: Skip it. We have other things to talk about. We have a job.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Captain Prescott: I don't like this. I don't like her coming here. Mr. Beardsley: She's had me worried for some time, a woman... of that sort. T.R. Devlin: What sort is that, Mr. Beardsley? Mr. Beardsley: I don't think any of us have any illusions about her character, have we Devlin? Devlin: Not at all. Not in the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn't hold a candle to your wife, sir, sitting in Washington playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry Adams and Henry James invite obvious comparisons. Exact contemporaries on the American literary scene, both were beguiled by... European culture, both were distressed by American ills. Philosophically and aesthetically they also had much in common. But these two writers arrived at logically opposite extremes in struggling with the historical, political, economic, and social problems of their age. Adams came to view the basic impulse toward unity as the force that could give coherence to the multiplicity of experience; he viewed philosophies of history as aesthetic systems that made it possible to organize the incoherence of historical and natural events. James, on the other hand, felt that art and history were inextricably related, and that history could be viewed in terms of the differing interpretations man designs to relate himself to the social or natural world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »