Will Durant Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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

Will Durant
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.

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

Will Durant
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.

Will Durant
We see matter and we miss energy; we think that we know what matter is; but when at the heart of the atom we find energy, we are bewildered, and our categories melt away.

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

Will Durant
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.

Will Durant
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
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

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

Will Durant
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.

Will Durant
Those of you who specialize in science will find it hard to understand religion, unless you feel, as Voltaire did, that the harmony of the spheres reveals a cosmic mind, and unless you realize, as Rousseau did, that man does not live by intellect alone.

Will Durant
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.

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

Will Durant
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
History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

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

Will Durant
It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

Will Durant
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
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.

Will Durant
Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into the known.

Will Durant
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.

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

Will Durant
Magic begins in superstition and ends in science.

Will Durant
I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process

Will Durant