Quotes By Will Durant

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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