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The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

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
Conquer
Creates
Borrows
Spread
Conquers
South
Summary
Civilization
Spreads
History
Civilizations
Ruins
North

More quotes by 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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Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
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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Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
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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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant
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We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.
Will Durant
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The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
Will Durant
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Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
Will Durant
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War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
Will Durant
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The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
Will Durant
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Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
Will Durant
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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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Liberty is a luxury of security the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
Will Durant
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The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West it is whether men can bear to live without God.
Will Durant