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History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

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
Flea
Fleas
Irritated
Profession
Serve
Service
Dies

More quotes by Henry Adams

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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
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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.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
Henry Adams
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Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
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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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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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