Will Durant quotes:

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

Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

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

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

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

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

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

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.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

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

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

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.

The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet."

Education is the transmission of civilization.

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.

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

In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.

A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

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.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

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

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.

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.

The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

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.

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.

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

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

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

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.

Communism is the opiate of the people.

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

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

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

But now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

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.

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

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

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say "Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.

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

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?

Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

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

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.

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.

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.

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

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.

Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.

For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.

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

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.

Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.

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

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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

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

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

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

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.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

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.

Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

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

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

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 what happened on the banks.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

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.

Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.

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.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Education is the transformation of civilisation

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

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

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.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

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