Will Durant Quotes
An American historian, philosopher and writer.
(1885 - 1981)
|
|
|
|
A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
|
|
|
|
As long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes, nations and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals, and more violently, knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things to the fray.
[Competition]
|
 |
|
|
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
|
|
|
|
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
|
|
|
|
Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.
|
|
|
|
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
|
|
|
|
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
|
|
|
|
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
|
|
|
|
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
[Education]
|
|
|
|
Education is the transmission of civilization.
[Education]
|
|
|
|
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
|
|
|
|
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
|
|
|
|
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
|
|
|
|
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in time of war.
|
|
|
|
Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
[The Present]
|
|
|
|
From the point of view of morals, life seems to he divided into two periods; in the first we indulge, in the second we preach.
|
|
|
|
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
|
|
|
|
I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|