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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

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
Ever
Men
Deceitful
Hype
Betrayed
Mistress
Deceit
Simplicity

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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
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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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If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.
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The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
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Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
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Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
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A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
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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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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
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To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
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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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No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
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The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
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