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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

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
Force
Historian
History
Statistics
Facts
Vital
Part
Forces
Human
Merely
Humans
Study
Take
Race
Grouped
Even
Fact
Extinction

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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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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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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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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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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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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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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
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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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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
Henry Adams
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams
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As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry Adams
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What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.
Henry Adams
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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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History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
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From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Henry Adams