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The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

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
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Personal
Cruelty
Temperaments
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Pleasure
Accidents
Torturing
Made
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Insane
Perverted
Men
Poor
Held
Blasphemy
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Deity
Woman
Atheism
Deities
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Moments
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Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
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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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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
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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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As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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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.
Henry Adams
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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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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.
Henry Adams
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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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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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I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
Henry Adams
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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
Henry Adams
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
Henry Adams
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A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
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I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
Henry Adams