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Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
Will Durant -
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
Will Durant -
Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.
Will Durant -
There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
Will Durant -
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.
Will Durant -
History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
Will Durant -
To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
Will Durant -
If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
Will Durant
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Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
Will Durant -
The finger that turns the dial rules the air.
Will Durant -
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant