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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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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
Sure
Anarchist
Many
Neighbor
Needs
Thinks
Men
Laws
Thinking
Case
Cases
Asks
Privately
Law
Superfluous

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Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
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The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.
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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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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
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Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
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Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
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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.
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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.
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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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Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
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A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.
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We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.
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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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