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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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 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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When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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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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In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
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Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
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The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
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The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
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As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
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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.
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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.
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The future never just happened. It was created.
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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.
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If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.
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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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Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.