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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.

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
Bottom
Struggle
Modern
Politics
Force
Men
Forces

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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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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
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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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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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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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Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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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.
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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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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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The proper study of mankind is woman.
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The philosopher says--I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:--No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
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Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
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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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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams