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

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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 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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That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
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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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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
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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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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.
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So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
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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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Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
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Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.
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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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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.
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Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
Will Durant
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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
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Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
Will Durant
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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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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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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.
Will Durant