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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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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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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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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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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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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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We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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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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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
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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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
Henry Adams
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
Henry Adams
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Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
Henry Adams
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams