Henry Adams Quotes About Politics
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Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
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He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
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You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!
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The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.
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As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.
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There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
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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.
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The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.
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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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