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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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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
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My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
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One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
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In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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They know enough who know how to learn.
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I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
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The gothic is singular in this one seems easily at home in the renaissance one is not too strange in the Byzantine as for the Roman, it is ourselves and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind all these styles seem modern when we come close to them but the gothic gets away.
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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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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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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
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My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.
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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.
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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An artist's business is only to see.
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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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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The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
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