Quotes By Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.

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

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

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.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

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.

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

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

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