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As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.

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
Without
Play
Lesson
Stands
Chinese
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History
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More quotes by 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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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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The gothic is singular in this one seems easily at home in the renaissance one is not too strange in the Byzantine as for the Roman, it is ourselves and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind all these styles seem modern when we come close to them but the gothic gets away.
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An artist's business is only to see.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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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.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
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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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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.
Henry Adams
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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry Adams
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams
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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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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.
Henry Adams
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Henry Adams
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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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[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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A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
Henry Adams
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams