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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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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
Class
Decent
Bourgeois
America
Reform
Respectable
Nothing
Ideals
Bores
Fruit
Domestic
Revile
Absolutely
Fairly
Tiresome
Except
Boredom
Youthful
Middle
Hopes
Reforms
Everybody
Ideal
Bore

More quotes by Henry Adams

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People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
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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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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
Henry Adams
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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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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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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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.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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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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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
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.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry Adams
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Society is immoral and immortal it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams