Will Durant Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

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

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

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

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

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.

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

Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

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.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people: Those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.

Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.

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

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

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

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

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

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.

The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.

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

As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.

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

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.

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.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.

Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.

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