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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

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
Great
Uncritical
Snare
Snares
Assumptions
Irrational
Assumption
Acceptance
Thought

More quotes by Will Durant

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Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
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We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
Will Durant