Will Durant Quotes
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The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
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The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
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Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.
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History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
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Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.
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History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
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The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
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Liberty is a product of order.
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The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.
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India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
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The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.
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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
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The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.