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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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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
Dies
Scepticism
Religion
Stoic
Individual
Civilizations
Born
Unbelief
Ends
Pursuit
Begin
Epicurean
Civilization
Stoicism
Pleasure
Undisciplined

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History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.
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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.
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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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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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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.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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Never mind your happiness do your duty.
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Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
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Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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From barbarism to civilization requires a century from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
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Even when repressed, inequality grows only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
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Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
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Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals
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I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
Will Durant