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Morality is a private and costly luxury.

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
Ethics
Morality
Private
Costly
Privacy
Luxury

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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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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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In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our 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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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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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If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
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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.
Henry Adams
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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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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Adams
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The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry Adams
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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams