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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.

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
Funny
Swift
Aviation
Intended
Hopeful
Statement
Statements

More quotes by Will Durant

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A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
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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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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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
Will Durant
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Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant
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Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
Will Durant
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The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.
Will Durant
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Time sanctifies everything even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.
Will Durant
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
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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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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So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Will Durant
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Education is the transformation of civilisation
Will Durant
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
Will Durant