Will Durant Quotes
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The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
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Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.
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In progressive societies the concentration of wealth may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
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The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
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Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
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By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
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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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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
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I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
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The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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Liberty is a product of order.
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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
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Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.
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The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
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Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
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Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.