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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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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
History
Lessons
Impressions
Ends
Asking
Lesson
Without
Line
Stands
Play
Century
Round
Going
Sort
Rounds
Lines
Impression
Lasts
Chinese
Last
Wrote

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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.
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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
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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.
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In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
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Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense that which they will, is right that which they reject, is wrong and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
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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.
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
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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.
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
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We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
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