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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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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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As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
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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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Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths
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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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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
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Christianity did not destroy paganism it adopted it.
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
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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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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.
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Even when repressed, inequality grows only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
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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 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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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.
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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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History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
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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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