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

More quotes by Henry Adams

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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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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.
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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry Adams
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An artist's business is only to see.
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All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
Henry Adams
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A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
Henry Adams
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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.
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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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
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I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
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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.
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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[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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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
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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.
Henry Adams
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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.
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In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams
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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
Henry Adams