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The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

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
Make
Mistakes
Expect
Travel
Ignorance
Mistake
Tourist
Less
Tourists
Need
Fewer
Needs
Explain

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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
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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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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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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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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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In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
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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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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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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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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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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They know enough who know how to learn.
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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
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[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
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Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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