Will Durant Quotations

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

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.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

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.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard

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.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I havenot had time to remake the world.

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

When his apprenticeship was finished (the candidate for Knighthood) was received into the Knightly Order by a ritual of sacramental awe...

Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.

Today's rebel is tomorrow's tyrant.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.

The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.

If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.

Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with from people , 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.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with from people , 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.

Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

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.

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.

If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

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

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.

Liberty is a product of order.

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

Cultivate your garden… Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony… In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

Communism is the opiate of the people.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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.

Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

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

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.

Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.

All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.

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.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.