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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

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
Flourishing
Absurdity
Hardly
Somewhere
Present
Found
Cannot
Past

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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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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.
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
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Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
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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.
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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.
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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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The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
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Liberty is a luxury of security the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
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Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
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If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
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Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.
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When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
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The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
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Often your face is your autobiography
Will Durant