Will Durant Quotes
-
By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
-
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
-
History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
-
In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
-
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.
-
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
-
Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.
-
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.
-
In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
-
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.
-
Liberty is a product of order.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
-
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.
-
Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
-
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.
-
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
-
Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
-
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
-
Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
-
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
-
It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
-
Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.