Quotes By Will Durant

Education is the transmission of civilization.

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

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

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

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

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

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

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.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

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.

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

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

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

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

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

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

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.

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

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

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.