"What worried Adams was not the commonplace; it was, as usual, his own education. Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called — and should actually and truly be — the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant's own commonplaces to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin."
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Academics from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesAutobiographers from the United StatesJournalists from Boston
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Henry Adams
1838 – 1918
US-amerikanischer Historiker
310 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Henry Adams →
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