Will Durant Quotes
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
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Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
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Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
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Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
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A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
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The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
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Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.
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India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
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Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
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Education is the transformation of civilisation
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Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
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Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths
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There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
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Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
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As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
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Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
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[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.
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If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.
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Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
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