A Quote by Will Durant

Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

Will Durant

Quote Topics

Acknowledged Equal Equal Power Equilibrium Only Peace Power Preserved Supremacy Unstable Which

Quote Author

Will Durant
American - Historian
November 5, 1885 - November 7, 1981

Equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium and equal weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards the weight which is at the greater distance.

Archimedes

We know the power of the U.S.. We do not fool ourselves about this power. We say that the U.S. government wants us to pay a very high price for this unstable peace we enjoy today. And the price we are in a position to pay is only - comes only to the frontiers of dignity, not beyond.

Che Guevara

We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

Abraham Lincoln

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

Herbert Spencer

The point in lifeis to find equilibrium in what is inherently unstable.

Pierre Reverdy

We're all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously or unconsciously. We can overtly support white-supremacist racial projects. We can reject white supremacy and support racial projects aimed at a democratic distibution of power and a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim to not be interested in race, in which case we almost certainly will end up tacitly supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to confront it. In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.

Robert Jensen

God is action, complete with mistakes, fumblings, persistence, agony. God is not the power that has found eternal equilibrium, but the power that is forever breaking every equilibrium, forever searching for a higher one.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters

Audre Lorde

Our vulnerability [to ressentiment] is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone "has the right" to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.

Zygmunt Bauman

There is a common belief that under modern conditions peace cannot be assured except on the basis of an equal balance of armaments...[but] true and lasting peace among nations cannot consist in the possession of an equal supply of armaments but only in mutual trust.

Pope John XXIII

Nearly all of us have a deep rooted wish for peace-peace on earth; but we shall never attain the true peace-the peace of love, and not the uneasy equilibrium of fear-until we recognize the place of animals in the scheme of things and treat them accordingly.

Hugh Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding

Moral Education is the source of that spiritual equilibrium on which everything else depends and which may be compared to that physical equilibrium or sense of balance, without which it is impossible to stand upright or to move into any other position.

Maria Montessori

It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general withtheir vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.

John Dos Passos

If patriotism is good, then Christianity, which gives peace, is an idle dream, and the sooner this teaching is eradicated, the better. But if Christianity really gives peace, and if we really want peace, then patriotism is a leftover from barbarous times, which must not only not be evoked and taught, as we now do, but which must be eradicated by all means of preaching, persuasion, contempt, and ridicule. If Christianity is the truth, and if we wish to live in peace, then we must not only have no sympathy for the power of our country, but must even rejoice in its weakening and contribute to it.