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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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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
Would
Rule
Questions
Answer
Students
Answers
Astounds
Asks
Deuce
Making
Deuces
Play
Examination

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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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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.
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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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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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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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That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true work and whiskey were his stimulants work was a form of vice but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
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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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An artist's business is only to see.
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All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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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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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
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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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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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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