Quotes By Will Durant

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

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.

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

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

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.

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

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.

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

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.

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

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.