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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

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
Government
Fifth
Work
Internals
Men
Internal
Task
Thousands
Tasks
Rate
Become
Controlling

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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!
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
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The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
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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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All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
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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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American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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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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Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
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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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Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
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History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
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The world is coming to an end in 1950.
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
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The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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Teachers affect eternity no one can tell where their influence stops.
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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