Will Durant Quotes
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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
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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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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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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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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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Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
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History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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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.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
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It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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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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Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
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If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
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Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the bankers know that history is inflationary.
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
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Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process.
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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.