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The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

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
Teaching
Study
History
Women
Historian
Useful
Ignorance

More quotes by Henry Adams

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Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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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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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
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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
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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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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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
Henry Adams
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Henry Adams
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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Some day science may 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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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
Henry Adams
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As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
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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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
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It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
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