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.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery
of your own ignorance.
– Will Durant
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather
than with their minds.
– Will Durant
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people
killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks,
unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry… The
story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
– Will Durant
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided
majority.
– Will Durant
When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.
– Will Durant
Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
– Will Durant
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six
thousand years.
– Will Durant
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves… let us be above such
transparent egotism.
– Will Durant
Education is the transmission of civilization.
– Will Durant
If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both,
combine external modesty with internal pride.
– Will Durant
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
– Will Durant
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic
ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the
end superior ability has its way.
– Will Durant
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do
it. Today is your lucky day.
– Will Durant
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will
hoard.
– Will Durant
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
– Will Durant
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite
without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated
in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you
are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back
into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you,
every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience
that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character,
your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood
without it.
– Will Durant
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
– Will Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968
As long as he fears or remembers insecurity, man is a competitive animal. Groups, classes,
nations and races similarly insecure compete as covetously as their constituent individuals,
and more violently, knowing less law and having less protection; Nature calls all living things
to the fray.
– Will Durant
Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
– Will Durant
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
– Will Durant
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
– Will Durant
Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
– Will Durant
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the
seat of the memory.
– Will Durant
Caesar’s armies marched on vegetarian foods.
– Will Durant
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his
old wife.
– Will Durant
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
– Will Durant
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes
respectable in time of war.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
– Will Durant
Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think
that’s a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take
an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you’ll eventually get along.
– Will Durant
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
– Will Durant
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
– Will Durant
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.
– Will Durant
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
– Will Durant
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
– Will Durant
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 revolutionaries are
philosophers and saints.
– Will Durant
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
– Will Durant
Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which
lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.
– Will Durant