Will Durant
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.Collection: Hope
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.Collection: War
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.Collection: Education
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.Collection: Knowledge
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.Collection: Love
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.Collection: Art
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.Collection: Knowledge
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.Collection: Science
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.Collection: Government
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.Collection: History
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.Collection: Knowledge
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.Collection: Independence
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.Collection: History
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.Collection: Age
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.Collection: Change
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.Collection: Education
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.Collection: Mom
Education is the transmission of civilization.Collection: Education
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.Collection: History
The family is the nucleus of civilization.Collection: Family
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.Collection: Good
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.Collection: History
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.Collection: Environmental
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
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.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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.
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
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.
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.
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.
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
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.
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.
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.Collection: War
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.Collection: Dust
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky dayCollection: Inspirational
The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.Collection: Civilization
To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.Collection: Self
From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.Collection: Civilization
The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.Collection: Men