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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

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
Tool
Tools
Almost
Religion
Else
Power
Everything
Like
Rulers

More quotes by Will Durant

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We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.
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
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
Will Durant
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Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.
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.
Will Durant
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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
Will Durant
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The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
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
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The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
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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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
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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Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant
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Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
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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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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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
Will Durant
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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
Will Durant
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The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
Will Durant
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Education is the transmission of civilization.
Will Durant