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Action(s)
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Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
-Will Durant
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Certainty
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
-Will Durant
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Civilization
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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry.
The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
-Will Durant
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Communism
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
-Will Durant
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Discipline
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Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
-Will Durant
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Education
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
-Will Durant
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Equality
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Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
-Will Durant
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Freedom
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We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.
-Will Durant
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Government
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Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.
-Will Durant
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Haste, Hurry
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
-Will Durant
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History
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One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
-Will Durant
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Inflation
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Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
-Will Durant
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Knowledge
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
-Will Durant
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Liberty
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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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Luck
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Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves; we have botched and bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the environment or the world, which have no tongues to utter a defense. The mature man accepts the natural limitations of life; he does not expect Providence to be prejudiced in his favor; he does not ask for loaded dice to play the game of life. He knows, with Carlyle, that there is no sense in vilifying the sun because it will not light our cigars. And perhaps, if we are clever enough to help it, the sun will even do that; and this vast neutral cosmos may turn out to be a pleasant place enough if we bring a little sunshine of our own to help it out. In truth, the world is neither with us or against us; it is but raw material in our hands, and can be heaven or hell according to what we are.
-Will Durant
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Mind, the
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The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.
-Will Durant
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Morals
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
-Will Durant
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Order
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When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
-Will Durant
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Patriotism
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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
-Will Durant
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Plagiarism
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
-Will Durant
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Prejudice
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Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.
-Will Durant
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Teaching
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Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
-Will Durant
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Books by and about Will Durant