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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Henry Adams

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Henry Adams
Age: 80 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 16
Died: 1918
Died: March 27
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
Mathematician
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Frances Snow Compton
Henry Adams
Responsible
Therefore
Liberty
Responsibility
Ideally
Free
Restraint
Individual
Absolutes
Absolute
Absence

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I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
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They know enough who know how to learn.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
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Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
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A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
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In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams