Will durant quotes

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

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.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

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.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

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.

Often your face is your autobiography

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

The future never just happened. It was created.

The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

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.

Liberty is a product of order.

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.

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.

If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.

Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.

Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.

Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

Nothing is new except arrangement.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

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.

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

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.

Communism is the opiate of the people.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

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.

We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

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.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to 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.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

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.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

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.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.

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.

In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

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.