Will Durant Quotes
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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
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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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Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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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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The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
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Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.
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Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.
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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
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History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
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So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
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In progressive societies the concentration of wealth may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
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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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We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
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Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.