“No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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Henry Adams 311
journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918Related quotes

1963, Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty speech
Context: Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe. Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard — and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby — who may be born long after we are gone — should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.

“Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.”
Source: The Emergence Of Probability, 1975, Chapter 12, Political Arithmetic, p. 102.

English and Welsh (1955)

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)