Will Durant Quotes
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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.
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Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
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As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
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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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In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
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Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.
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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.
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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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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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The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.
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The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.
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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
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A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.
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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.