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

More quotes by Will Durant

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So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.
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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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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
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The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people: Those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.
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Christianity did not destroy paganism it adopted it.
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Education is the transmission of civilization.
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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
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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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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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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.
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
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As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
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Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
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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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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant
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The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
Will Durant
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Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Will Durant