Will Durant Quotes
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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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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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 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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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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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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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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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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History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.
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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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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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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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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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Liberty is a product of order.
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The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
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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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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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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.