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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.

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
Civilized
Fortunate
Dies
Children
Much
Men
Transmit
Gather
Heritage

More quotes by 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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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
Will Durant
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Often your face is your autobiography
Will Durant
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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
Will Durant
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Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
Will Durant
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
Will Durant
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I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
Will Durant
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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
Will Durant
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
Will Durant
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Will Durant
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
Will Durant
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Will Durant
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Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.
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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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Will Durant
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In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
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Never mind your happiness do your duty.
Will Durant
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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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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