Will Durant Quotes
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Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game.
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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
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Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.
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Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
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Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
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Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
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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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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.
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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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There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.
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To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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The finger that turns the dial rules the air.
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
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The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.
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What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.