Will Durant Quotes
-
If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
-
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.
-
Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the bankers know that history is inflationary.
-
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
-
Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
-
As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
-
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
-
In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
-
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
-
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.
-
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
-
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.
-
For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
-
The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
-
Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.