Top 100 Will Durant Quotes
#1. The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.
Chris Hedges
#2. At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"
Norman Cousins
#3. The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men. The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and
Will Durant
#4. 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
#5. Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.
Will Durant
#6. Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling
in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.
Will Durant
#7. To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
Will Durant
#8. Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant
#9. A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another, and may erupt in blood or print, irrevocably.
Will Durant
#10. I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.
Will Durant
#11. After 1196 the vigorous merchant-aristocrats of Novgorod dominated the assembly that ruled the principality through its elected prince. The city-state was a free republic, and called itself "My Lord Novgorod the Great." If
Will Durant
#12. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
Will Durant
#13. Centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepticism, and artistic aberrations.
Will Durant
#16. News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa's death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy.
Will Durant
#17. Democritus (460-360 B.C.) - in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.
Will Durant
#18. 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.
Will Durant
#19. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If
Will Durant
#20. Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.
Will Durant
#21. 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.
Will Durant
#22. He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen.
Will Durant
#23. As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
Will Durant
#24. On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
Will Durant
#25. History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
Will Durant
#26. 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.
Will Durant
#27. 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.
Will Durant
#28. The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
Will Durant
#29. 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.
Will Durant
#30. It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
Will Durant
#31. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For
Will Durant
#32. When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
Will Durant
#33. The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Will Durant
#34. Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.
Will Durant
#35. The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
Will Durant
#36. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
Will Durant
#37. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A
Will Durant
#38. From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
Will Durant
#39. War does one good - it teaches people geography.
Will Durant
#40. Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
Will Durant
#41. History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.
Will Durant
#42. Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
Will Durant
#43. Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.
Will Durant
#44. [S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.
Will Durant
#45. Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
Will Durant
#46. 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.
Will Durant
#47. One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.
Will Durant
#49. 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.
Will Durant
#50. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.
Will Durant
#51. 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
Will Durant
#52. Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
Will Durant
#53. To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
Will Durant
#54. To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves ... let us be above such transparent egotism.
Will Durant
#56. Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.
Will Durant
#57. War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
Will Durant
#58. 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.
Will Durant
#59. The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
Will Durant
#60. We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.
Will Durant
#61. In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
Will Durant
#62. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.
Will Durant
#63. But which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
Will Durant
#64. Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
Will Durant
#65. 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.
Will Durant
#66. Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
#67. Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit.
Will Durant
#68. Racial antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture - of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.
Will Durant
#69. Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
Will Durant
#71. Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing," he said. "All people are good except those who are idle.
Will Durant
#72. 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.
Will Durant
#73. Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
Will Durant
#74. Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; "the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people";41 and "Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?
Will Durant
#75. For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
Will Durant
#76. As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Will Durant
#77. [R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.
Will Durant
#78. A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.
Will Durant
#79. The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
Will Durant
#80. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
Will Durant
#81. Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
Will Durant
#82. Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
Will Durant
#83. Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
Will Durant
#84. Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus - "Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps
Will Durant
#85. And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.
Will Durant
#86. History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
Will Durant
#87. To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . .
Will Durant
#88. Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
Will Durant
#89. No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.
Will Durant
#90. The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.
Will Durant
#91. 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
#92. If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
Will Durant
#93. 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.
Will Durant
#94. The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Will Durant
#95. 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
Will Durant
#96. It is a glorious privilege to be alive. Neither scientific analysis nor a multitude of words will describe
Will Durant
#97. 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.
Will Durant
#98. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;
Will Durant
#99. Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.
Will Durant
#100. 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.
Will Durant
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