Will Durant Quotes
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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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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Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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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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Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
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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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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
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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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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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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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To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
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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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India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
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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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Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
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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.