Quotes By Will Durant

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

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.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

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.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

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

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

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

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.