Will Durant Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
-
The finger that turns the dial rules the air.
-
Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.
-
How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
-
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
-
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
-
The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
-
To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
-
Communism is the opiate of the people.
-
To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
-
The future never just happened. It was created.
-
What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.
-
Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
-
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
-
No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
-
In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
-
Nothing is new except arrangement.
-
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.
-
Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
-
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.
-
That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
-
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.