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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.

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
Dog
Breeds
Figures
Throws
Pleasure
Mississippi
American
Author
Making
River
Doe
Favorite
Drowns
Men
Rivers
Splash
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More quotes by Henry Adams

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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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 study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
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Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
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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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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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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
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Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
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As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
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I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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.
Henry Adams
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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