Quotes from Will Durant

When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.

The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of "trained skill."138 Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

W]orship, if not the child, is at least the brother, of fear.

Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.

Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.

Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order

Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.

All strong characters and peoples are race conscious and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group.

When he sent to Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, with its arguments against civilization, letters, and science, and for a return to the natural condition as seen in savages and animals, Voltaire replied: "I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it . . . . No one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes; to read your book makes one long to go on all fours.

The idea of hell disappeared from educated thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyterians became ashamed of the Westminster Confession, which had pledged them to belief in a God who had created billions of men and women despite his foreknowledge that, regardless of their virtues and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting hell.

They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they (bankers) know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding"5

for most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice)

Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit.

Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and

The Egyptians enjoyed a great variety of diseases, though they had to die of them without knowing their Greek names.

All those fascinating varieties of terrain—mountains and valleys, fiords and straits, gulfs and streams—that make Europe a panorama of diverse delight, have broken the population of a minor continent into a score of peoples cherishing their differences, and self-imprisoned in their heritage of hate.

Intellectualism—the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends—fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer.

Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted.

says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.")

All forms of governments destroy themselves, by carrying their basic principles to excess. Democracies become too free in politics, in economics, in morals – even in literature and art, until at last even the dogs in our homes, rise up on their hind legs and demand their rights. Disorder grows to such a point that society will then abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.

As the contrast between the militant and the industrial types is indicated by inversion of the belief that individuals exist for the benefit of the state into the belief that the state exists for the benefit of individuals; so the contrast between the industrial type and the type likely to be evolved from it is indicated by inversion of the belief that life is for work into the belief that work is for life.