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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
Morality
Private
Costly
Privacy
Luxury
Ethics

More quotes by Henry Adams

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I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams
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Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
Henry Adams
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
Henry Adams
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I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Henry Adams
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The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
Henry Adams
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
Henry Adams
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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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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Adams
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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
Henry Adams
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
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The gothic is singular in this one seems easily at home in the renaissance one is not too strange in the Byzantine as for the Roman, it is ourselves and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind all these styles seem modern when we come close to them but the gothic gets away.
Henry Adams