Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Checking in ...................

..........................with Will Durant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within

At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

You can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

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