Quotes from Will Durant

apparently there was no reason now why a man should not do as he pleased, so long as he remained within the law. A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character

Democracy is a luxury of disseminated intelligence, security, and peace.

if you are alone, you are all your own; with a companion you are half yourself; so you squander yourself according to the indiscretion of your company.

His wife does not dress for him, only when he has gone away and is no longer in her mind; he sees her in a disheveled negligee, while all through the day he meets women powdered and primped and curled, whose charming knees and inviting frocks and encouraging smiles and aphrodisiac perfumes leave him hovering hourly over the abysses of disloyalty.

How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening;

Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.V

In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

For the mind of man (and here at last is the great thesis of Kant) is not passive wax upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will; nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ which moulds and coördinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.

Consequently—since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups—the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose.

Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.

There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education.

We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind.

No civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics

Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."2 Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

The Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul.

Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter's wives and children sufficed to do the menial work.

It costs as much to support a vice as it does to support a family.

fue el miedo lo que en primer lugar creó a los dioses»:1 el miedo a fuerzas ocultas en la tierra, los ríos, los océanos, los árboles, los vientos y el cielo. La religión se convirtió en el culto propiciatorio de esas fuerzas a través de ofrendas, sacrificios, conjuros y oraciones.

Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.

a handful of might is better than a bagful of right.

What if the proper functioning of the intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will (desire) but the coordination of desires into a united and harmonious will?

Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes.

the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace.

If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an Anarchist Unphilosophical, and thinks Laws in his own case superfluous.