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.
Will Durant
Quotes to Explore
My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.
John L. Phillips
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.
W. G. Sebald
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.
Rachel Caine
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.
Lewis H. Lapham
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.
P. J. O'Rourke
When the sun comes up, I have morals again.
Elayne Boosler
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Oscar Wilde
Practical dreamers have always been and always will be the pattern-makers of civilization.
Napoleon Hill
You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, and wipe it clean of life - but if you desire to defend it, protect it,and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman Legions did - by putting your soldiers in the mud.
T. R. Fehrenbach
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark
Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?
Nolan Bushnell
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.
I. M. Pei
There are capitalist states which consider themselves cheated, during previous redivisions of spheres of influence, territories, sources of raw materials, markets, etc., and which would again desire to redivide them to their own advantage.
Joseph Stalin
We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.
Sherman Alexie
Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.
Arthur Conan Doyle
A person may be Baptized, and yet not born again to grace, in consequence of not having the necessary dispositions at Baptism.
Alphonsus Liguori
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.
Will Durant
