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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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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
Life
Harness
Broken
Taking
Becoming
Boys
Dies
Colt
Nature
Colts
Men
Tame

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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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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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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
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Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
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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 less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
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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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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
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No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
Henry Adams
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
Henry Adams
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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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My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
Henry Adams
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The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
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The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.
Henry Adams