Will Durant Quotes
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Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
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History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
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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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In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.
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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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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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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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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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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
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Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
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Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
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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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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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History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
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Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
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India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
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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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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.