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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
Present
Found
Cannot
Past
Flourishing
Absurdity
Hardly
Somewhere

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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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Will Durant
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Science tells us how to heal and how to kill it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Will Durant
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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
Will Durant
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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Will Durant
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The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
Will Durant
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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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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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Liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
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Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Will Durant
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Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Will Durant
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.
Will Durant
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Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant
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Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
Will Durant
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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
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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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
Will Durant