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Date of Birth
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05-November-1885
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Place of Birth
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North Adams
(Berkshire County, Massachusetts, United States of America)
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Nationality
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United States of America
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Also know as
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William James Durant
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Profession
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Historian, Writer, Librarian, Teacher, Philosopher
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Quotes
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- Nothing is new except arrangement.
- Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
- 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.
- No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
- The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.
- The family is the nucleus of civilization.
- Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
- Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
- Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
- Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
- We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.
- One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
- Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
- When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
- 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.
- Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.
- Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
- There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
- Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
- Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
- Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
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William James Durant was a American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things sub specie totius, a phrase inspired by Spinoza's sub specie aeternitatis. He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application.
Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
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