Will Durant's Quotes

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

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

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

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

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.