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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

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
Senile
Regarding
Elders
Passion
Young
Men

More quotes by Henry Adams

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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.
Henry Adams
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry Adams
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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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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.
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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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
Henry Adams
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That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true work and whiskey were his stimulants work was a form of vice but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
Henry Adams
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
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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An artist's business is only to see.
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!
Henry Adams
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Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
Henry Adams
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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.
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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Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Henry Adams
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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Henry Adams
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams