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No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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
Mean
Says
Men
Politics
Words
Language
Means
Political
Thought
Truth
Slippery

More quotes by Henry Adams

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As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry Adams
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As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
Henry Adams
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The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry Adams
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You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
Henry Adams
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
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Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Henry Adams
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One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
Henry Adams
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One friend in a life-time is much two are many three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
Henry Adams
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Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
Henry Adams
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They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
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Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry Adams
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What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.
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.
Henry Adams