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Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

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
Long
Overcoming
Flourished
Began
Remained
Vision
Heroism
Enemy
Rome
Dies
Forced
Moment
Overcome
Moments
Enemies
Great
Unity

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History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
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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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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.
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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
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Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
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Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
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As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
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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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There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
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Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
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