Will Durant Quotes

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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

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

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.

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

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

Nothing is new except arrangement.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

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

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on.

It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

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

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

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

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

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

Education is the transmission of civilization.

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.

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.

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.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry.The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.