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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

Will Durant

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Will Durant
Age: 96 †
Born: 1885
Born: November 5
Died: 1981
Died: November 7
Historian
Philosopher
Writer
North Adams
Massachusetts
William James Will Durant
William James Durant
Become
May
Wartime
Every
Respectable
Vice
Vices
Hatred
Becomes
Virtue

More quotes by Will Durant

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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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Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
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Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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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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Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant
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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
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Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
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Drunkenness was in good repute in England till Bloody Mary frowned upon it it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.
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Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
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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.
Will Durant
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If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
Will Durant
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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The future never just happened. It was created.
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
Will Durant
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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
Will Durant
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
Will Durant