Top 192 Quotes & Sayings by Will Durant

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

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

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

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

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

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

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

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.

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

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

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

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.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

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

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

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

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

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

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

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.

Liberty is a product of order.

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.

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

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.

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.

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

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.

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