Will Durant Quotes
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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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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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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.
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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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In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.
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Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
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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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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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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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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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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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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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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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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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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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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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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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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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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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Cultivate your garden Do not depend upon teachers to educate you follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.
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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
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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.