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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
Women
Historian
Useful
Ignorance
Teaching
Study
History

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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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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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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
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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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History is only a value of relation.
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Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
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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 idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
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No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
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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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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
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A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
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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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Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
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