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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.

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
People
War
Fixed
Reception
History
Minds
Orleans
Three
News
Avenues
Become
Took
Struck
Ideas
Days
Division
Mind
Quite
Capture
Believe
American
Sunday
Make
Idea
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More quotes by Henry Adams

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Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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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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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.
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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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[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.
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
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The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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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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What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.
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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.
Henry Adams
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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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.
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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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
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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 woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams