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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
Facts
Vital
Part
Forces
Human
Merely
Humans
Study
Take
Race
Grouped
Even
Fact
Extinction
Force
Historian
History
Statistics
More quotes by Henry Adams
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
Henry Adams
Man loves most that which is his own.
Henry Adams
In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
Henry Adams
Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
Henry Adams
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
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.
Henry Adams
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
Henry Adams
Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Henry Adams
The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
Henry Adams
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
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
Henry Adams
I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
Henry Adams
