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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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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
Quality
Disgusting
Community
Advance
Best
Communities
Good
Qualities
Never
Wild
Degraded
Men
Higher
Marked
Stage
Risen
Came
Tribes

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Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
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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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The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
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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.
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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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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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
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No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
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If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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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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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
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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.
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