"Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man."
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Henry Adams quotes (page 2 of 11)
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"Friends are born, not made."
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"The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin."
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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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"Morality is a private and costly luxury."
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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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"A friend in power is a friend lost."
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"The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies."
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"[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore."
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"My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to."
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"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."
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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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"It is always good men who do the most harm in the world."
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"The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society."
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"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
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"I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down."
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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."
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"The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them."
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"Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage."
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"The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin."
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