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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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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
Literary
Pursuit
Educated
Rich
History
Obliges
Wells
Aristocratic
Well
Pursuits
Historian

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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.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.
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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
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.
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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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No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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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.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
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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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They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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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.
Henry Adams