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Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

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
Excess
Principle
Basic
Principles
Form
Government
Every
Perish
Tends

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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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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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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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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.
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The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
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The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
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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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Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
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In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
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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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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
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I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
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The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
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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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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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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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