“The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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Henry Adams 311
journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918Related quotes

“Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.”
The Ballad of the King's Jest, Stanza 4
Other works
Remark: Kenneth Boulding gave the same example in his 1945 The economics of peace, p. 74
Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 23

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 51

“Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.”
De Libero Arbitrio (388 - 395)

Source: Violence and the Labor Movement (1914), p. 92-93
Context: About the kindest criticism that the socialist makes of the anarchist is that he is a child, while the anarchist is convinced that the socialist is a Philistine and an inbred conservative who, should he ever get power, would immediately hang the anarchists. They are traditional enemies, who seem utterly incapable of understanding each other. Intellectually, they fail to grasp the meaning of each other's philosophy. It is but rare that a socialist, no matter how conscientious a student, will confess he fully understands anarchism. On the other hand, no one understands the doctrines of socialism so little as the anarchist.