The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a habit stood in one's way; in America, it roused all the instincts of native jealousy. The English mind was one-sided, eccentric, systematically unsystematic, and logically illogical. The less one knew of it, the better.

This heresy, which scarcely would have been allowed to penetrate a Boston mind -- it would, indeed, have been shut out by instinct as a rather foolish exaggeration -- rested on an experience which Henry Adams gravely thought he had a right to think conclusive -- for him. That it should be conclusive for anyone else never occurred to him, since he had no thought of educating anybody else. For him -- alone -- the less English education he got, the better!