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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

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
Moralist
Statesman
Statesmen
Afford
Cannot

More quotes by Will Durant

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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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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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Liberty is a luxury of security the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
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There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.
Will Durant
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
Will Durant
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History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
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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.
Will Durant
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Science tells us how to heal and how to kill it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Will Durant
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Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.
Will Durant
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
Will Durant
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Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
Will Durant
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Civilization is not inherited it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
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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From barbarism to civilization requires a century from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
Will Durant
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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 civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
Will Durant