Top 100 Will Durant Quotes
#1. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and
Will Durant
#2. Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.
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#3. To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
Will Durant
#4. Democritus (460-360 B.C.) - in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.
Will Durant
#5. 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.
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#6. History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
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#7. 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.
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#8. The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
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#9. The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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#10. War does one good - it teaches people geography.
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#11. History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.
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#12. Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
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#14. There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. 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.
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#15. But before twenty is the joy of the body, and after thirty is the joy of the mind; before twenty is the pleasure of protection and security; and after thirty, the joy of parentage and home. How
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#16. Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
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#17. To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves ... let us be above such transparent egotism.
Will Durant
#19. War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
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#20. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, ... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.
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#21. The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
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#22. Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
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#23. Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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#25. It was fear that first made the gods25 - fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer.
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#26. Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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#27. For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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#28. [R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.
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#29. The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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#30. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
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#31. Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
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#32. Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
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#33. History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
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#34. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . .
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#35. No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.
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#36. Grow strong, my comrade ... that you may stand
Unshaken when I fall; that I may know
The shattered fragments of my song will come
At last to finer melody in you;
That I may tell my heart that you begin
Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
Will Durant
#37. The family is the nucleus of civilization.
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#38. Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths
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#39. All this national decay, all this weakening of the state, this obviously imminent subjection of Judah to Babylon, were, it seemed to Jeremiah, Yahveh's hand laid upon the Jews in punishment for their sins.
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#40. Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants "in spite of the fact," says the geographer, "that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains.
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#41. All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.
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#42. If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history
Will Durant
#43. There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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#44. History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.
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#45. 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.
Will Durant
#46. Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
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#47. There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself.
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#48. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
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#49. 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.
Will Durant
#50. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters - like shoe-making - we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
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#51. The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
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#52. 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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#53. Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.
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#54. 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.
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#55. To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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#56. Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.
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#57. There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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#58. The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia.
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#59. On his tombstone only three words were necessary: HERE LIES VOLTAIRE
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#60. Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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#61. In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
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#62. The timid weakness of individuals, the insecurity of groups, and the delusion of superiority generated perpetual fear, suspicion, dislike, and contempt of the different, the alien, and the strange.
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#64. Death like style is the removal of rubbish.
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#65. Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
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#66. Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.
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#67. But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.
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#68. History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.
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#69. Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.
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#70. India was the motherland of our race
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages.
India was the mother of our philosophy,
of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity ... of self-government and democracy.
In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all.
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#71. Nothing is impossible to gods and authors.
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#72. The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
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#73. Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
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#74. In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.
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#75. There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.
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#76. This is the tragedy of almost every civilization - that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.
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#77. Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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#78. 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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#79. As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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#80. Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.
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#81. Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
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#82. A man is as old as his arteries and as young as his ideas.
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#83. So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.
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#84. Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.
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#85. The finger that turns the dial rules the air.
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#86. 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.
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#87. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
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#88. The Egyptians enjoyed a great variety of diseases, though they had to die of them without knowing their Greek names.
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#89. Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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#90. A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.
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#91. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
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#92. Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
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#93. We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?
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#94. It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life - bene vixit qui bene latuit.
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#95. 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.
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#96. Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
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#97. Many simple peoples feared the exceptional individual as a disintegrating force; there is a Chinese proverb that "the great man is a public misfortune.
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#98. When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.
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#99. The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding
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#100. 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.
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