Will Durant Quotes

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.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

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.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

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

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.

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

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

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.