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

More quotes by Henry Adams

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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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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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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.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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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.
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.
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It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
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I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every.
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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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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Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
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During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
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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.
Henry Adams
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In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams
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If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.
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Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry Adams