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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!

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
Fall
Mighty
Littles
Pray
May
God
Little
Praying
Enough
Evolution
Men
Fate
Ignorance
Learn

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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.
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As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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In the one branch he most needed
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint responsibility is restraint therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
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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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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.
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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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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
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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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No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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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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My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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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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That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true work and whiskey were his stimulants work was a form of vice but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
Henry Adams