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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.

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
Artist
Least
Heads
Social
Courses
Corporations
Power
Course
Scientific
May
Situation
Forces
Statesman
Without
Rich
Changing
Elevators
Every
Church
Artists
Disappeared
Long
Force
Authority
Statesmen
Men
Living
Cutting
Literary

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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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Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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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.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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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.
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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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.
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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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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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We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
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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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The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams