40 Quotes by Will Durant
- Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
- The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
- The family is the nucleus of civilization.
- The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
- Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- 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.
- Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
- The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
- There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
- There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
- To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
- Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
- 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.
- We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.
- Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
- When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
- One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
- Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
- Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
- Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
- 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.
- A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
- 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.
- Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
- 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.
- Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
- 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.
- Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
- Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
- Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
- Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
- Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
- The strongest oak tree grows in opposition to the wind, not in the absence of it.
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