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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Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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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.
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The future never just happened. It was created.
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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.
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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.
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The finger that turns the dial rules the air.
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals.
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
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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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When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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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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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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The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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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.
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To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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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.
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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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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The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for 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 the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.