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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.

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
Live
Lazy
Always
Property
Men
Labor
Weak
Working
Upon
Strong
Compulsion
Nature
Laziness

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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
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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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History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
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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.
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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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History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
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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.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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They know enough who know how to learn.
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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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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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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
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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 world is coming to an end in 1950.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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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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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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History is only a value of relation.
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