Words matter. These are the best Will Durant Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Education is the transmission of civilization.
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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.
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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.
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
