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An artist's business is only to see.

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
Artist
Business

More quotes by Henry Adams

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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
Henry Adams
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I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
Henry Adams
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
Henry Adams
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Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
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.
Henry Adams
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My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
Henry Adams
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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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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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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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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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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[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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams
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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
Henry Adams
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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
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams