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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.

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
Strong
Remain
Priest
Else
Subject
Senators
Certain
However
Stations
Anything
Subjects
Priests
Stiffness
Years
Effects
Ten
Schoolmaster
Men
Attitude
Effect
Dogmatic
Life
Forever
Serve
Fixing
Though
Fit
Senator

More quotes by Henry Adams

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People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
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In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
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Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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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.
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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.
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
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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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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
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History is only a value of relation.
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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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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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
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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.
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As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry Adams
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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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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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An artist's business is only to see.
Henry Adams