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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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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
Would
Introspection
Avoided
Studies
Tragedy
Study
Knew
Rather
Mind

More quotes by 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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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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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In the one branch he most needed
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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A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
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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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.
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
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
Henry Adams
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
Henry Adams
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All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people
Henry Adams
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry Adams
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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Henry Adams
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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
Henry Adams
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People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
Henry Adams
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
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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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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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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams