Quote

[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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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
Think
Year
Foolish
Railway
Thinking
Turns
Bed
Comforts
Order
Horror
Regarding
Two
Million
Slaughter
Give
Green
Conquest
Flannel
Must
Comfort
Midnight
Flannels
Giving
Turn
Warfare
Railways
Years
Millions
Electric
Philippines

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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.
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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 the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
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One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
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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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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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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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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.
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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.
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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
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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 American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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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.
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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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