Quotes from Will Durant

Homer is right: "Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master." For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: "for men of eminent ability there is no law—they are themselves a law.

Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man

There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.

Death is the origin of all religions, and perhaps if there had been no death there would have been no gods.

It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life—bene vixit qui bene latuit.

Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast."2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always "either a feast or a famine.

In this loose structure law was weak, unpopular, and diverse. The people preferred to be ruled by custom, and to settle their disputes by face-saving compromises out of court. They expressed their view of litigation by such pithy proverbs as "Sue a flea and catch a bite," or "Win your lawsuit, lose your money.

Perhaps our supercilious disgust with existence is a cover for a secret disgust with ourselves: we have botched and bungled our lives, and we cast the blame upon the environment, or the world, which have no tongues to utter a defense.

Sensation is unorganized stimulus, perception is organized sensation, conception is organized perception, science is organized knowledge, wisdom is organized life: each is a greater degree of order, and sequence, and unity.

The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.

A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; "the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people";41 and "Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.

the decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions—

privately he composed—in French—a poem expressing his pleasure at having given the French a kick in the cul, which Carlyle delicately translated as "the seat of honor.

He is never fired with admiration, since there is nothing great in his eyes. He cannot live in complaisance with others, except it be a friend; complaisance is the characteristic of a slave . . . .

Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants.

A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment?

Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence "a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.