Will Durant Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
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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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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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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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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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Liberty is a product of order.
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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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War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
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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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We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
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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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So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
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Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.