Politics & Power Quote by Henry B. Adams

Adams delivers the line like a historian with a scalpel: clean, cold, and quietly devastating. "Practical" is the bait word. It sounds like competence, maturity, the grown-up stuff that gets roads paved and budgets passed. Then he flips it, suggesting that what passes for practicality in politics is less problem-solving than disciplined evasiveness. The punch isn’t just cynicism; it’s taxonomy. He’s classifying politics as a system that survives by managing reality, not submitting to it.

The subtext is about incentives. Facts are unruly: they complicate narratives, demand trade-offs, and expose the gap between what’s promised and what’s possible. A politician chasing power or stability doesn’t always lose by being wrong; they lose by being out of step with the coalition, the mood, the myth. "Ignoring" here doesn’t mean stupidity. It means selection. It means learning which truths to bracket so a policy can be sold, a faction kept intact, a crisis deferred until after the next election. It’s political skill reframed as moral and intellectual surrender.

Coming from Adams, a member of the famous Adams dynasty watching the U.S. industrialize into a more chaotic, mass-democratic, media-driven order, the line reads as a lament from someone trained to revere evidence and continuity. He’s also warning historians and citizens: don’t confuse the appearance of governance with fidelity to reality. Practical politics often functions like theater with consequences - and the first casualty is the fact itself.