Will Durant Quotes
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There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
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Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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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.
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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.
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The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
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When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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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.
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
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Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals.
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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The future never just happened. It was created.
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
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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.
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Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
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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.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
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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.