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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

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
Systematic
Nationalism
Profession
Hatred
Organization
Politics
Hatreds
Whatever
Professions
Always
Practise

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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
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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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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
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Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
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Society is immoral and immortal it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
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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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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
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The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
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History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
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Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
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History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
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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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In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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