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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The purpose of all wars, is peace.
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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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Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies.
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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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My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.
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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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It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies.
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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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Practical dreamers have always been and always will be the pattern-makers of civilization.
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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.
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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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I believe that the civilization India evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors, Rome went, Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become Westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.
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When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.
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Elegance has nothing to do with fashion.
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The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno.
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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.
