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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.

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
Back
Boredom
Rubs
Live
Bored
Ennui
World
Ideals
Violently
Tired
Kindly
Beyond
Sailor
Loved
Endurance
Ready
Fairly
Though
Salt
Flogged

More quotes by Henry Adams

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Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
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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.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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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.
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
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Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
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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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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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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
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The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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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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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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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
Henry Adams
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
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One friend in a life-time is much two are many three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
Henry Adams
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
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If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
Henry Adams
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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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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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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams