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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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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
Generations
Transmission
Learned
Anew
Century
Inherited
Dies
Interrupted
History
Earned
Would
Savages
Generation
Civilization

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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
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The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
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Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
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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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Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice.
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The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
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The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
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Civilizations come and go they conquer the earth and crumble into dust but faith survives every desolation.
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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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Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
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So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.
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