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America
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
-Henry Adams
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Chance
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Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
-Henry Adams
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Education
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They know enough who know how to learn.
-Henry Adams
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Facts
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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, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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Friends
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One friend in a lifetime 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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Humanity
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
-Henry Adams
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Inferiority
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
-Henry Adams
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Liberty
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Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
-Henry Adams
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Mathematics
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In the one branch he most needed
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter IV (p. 60)
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Men & Women
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
-Henry Adams
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Morals
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Morality is a private and costly luxury.
-Henry Adams
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Order
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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
-Henry Adams
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Philosophy
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Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
-Henry Adams
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Politics
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Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Potential
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.
-Henry Adams
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Power
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
-Henry Adams
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Presidency
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Society
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American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
-Henry Adams
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Style
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Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
-Henry Adams
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Teaching
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A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-Henry Adams
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Words
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No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 after Adam's death
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
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Books by and about Henry Adams