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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

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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
Life
Likes
Piracy
Single
Plagiarism
Democracy
Wholesale
Greatest
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Anyone
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May
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Love
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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.
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
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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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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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The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.
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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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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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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.
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An artist's business is only to see.
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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
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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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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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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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The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
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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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Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
Henry Adams