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From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.

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
Country
Liberty
Double
Feel
Eyes
Town
Feels
Law
Towns
Schoolmaster
Men
Lying
Winter
Pretended
Life
Eye
Summer
Earliest
Tell
Childhood
Hostile
Littles
Lies
Accustomed
Little
Boys
Employed

More quotes by Henry Adams

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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
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Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
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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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To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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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.
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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
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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
Henry Adams
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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.
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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.
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Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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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