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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
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More quotes by Henry Adams
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
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
Henry Adams
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
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams
To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
Henry Adams
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
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams
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
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.
Henry Adams
Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
Henry Adams
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
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams