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

More quotes by Will Durant

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Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.
Will Durant
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
Will Durant
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History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.
Will Durant
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History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
Will Durant
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Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
Will Durant
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
Will Durant
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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
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.
Will Durant
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Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty certainty is murderous.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Will Durant
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Liberty is a luxury of security the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
Will Durant
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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