Will Durant Quotes, Thoughts and image

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

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

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

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

Education is the transmission of civilization.

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.

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

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

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

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?

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

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

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.

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

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

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

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

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.

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

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.

Communism is the opiate of the people.

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

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

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

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

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

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.