Will Durant Quotes
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Quotes to Explore
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Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.
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I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.
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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.
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We Jews have been too adaptable. We have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies for the sake of social conformity. … Even in modern civilization, the Jew is most happy if he remains a Jew.
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Human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.
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Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.
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Further strengthenings of the self-centered instinct for survival recruit even greater numbers of people into some sort of ring of fellowship (church or gender, red state or blue) by populating the terra incognita outside the ring with enough barbarians to verify the existence of a civilization within--to define the preferred stock by what, as all good people agree, it decidedly is not.
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Now for good or ill, California is the place where trends tend to be set in Western civilization - if civilization indeed it is. California, for several generations now, has been the newest, biggest, most experimental place in the newest, biggest, most experimental part of liberal Western capitalism - which is itself a new experiment for mankind.
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When the sun comes up, I have morals again.
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Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
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Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?
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I know something about the civilization of China, with my background, obviously, and I think I know something about American history. But that's about all. And I've traveled all over the world, and for a long time I didn't know very much about it, really.
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I think women can save civilization.
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More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else...All our lauded technological progress-our very civilization-is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
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Older men start wars, but younger men fight them.
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Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars...The stakes are immense, the task colossal the time is short. But we may hope- we must hope- that man's own creation, man's own genius, will not destroy him.
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There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government.
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The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.
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One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction.
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A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
