Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry B. Adams

Adams is doing more than snarling at newspapers; he is registering a late-19th-century crisis of authority, when industrial capital, mass-circulation media, and party machinery fused into something that felt both modern and rigged. Calling the press a "hired agent" yanks journalism out of the realm of civic stewardship and drops it into the labor market: reporters and editors as wage earners taking dictation from wealth. The phrase "monied system" is deliberately impersonal, almost hydraulic. He is not accusing one corrupt publisher; he is indicting an ecosystem where money sets the incentives and truth becomes a cost center.

The sentence is built like an escalation. First, a claim about structure ("hired agent"). Then a claim about purpose ("set up for no other purpose"). Then the moral climax ("to tell lies") narrowed by a lawyerly clause: "where their interests are involved". That qualifier is the pivot. Adams isn't pretending every printed word is false; he's arguing that the moment stakes rise, the institution snaps into propaganda because its loyalties are already purchased.

The final line - "One can trust nobody and nothing" - is the emotional spillover of a historian watching the supposed record of public life become contaminated at the source. It's also a strategic overreach: the absolutism is less a philosophical position than a rhetorical symptom, the sound a liberal order makes when it realizes its information channels are not neutral pipes but contested terrain. In Adams's Gilded Age, "objectivity" was still being invented; his bitterness reads like an early warning about media capture, before we had the vocabulary to call it that.