Quotes from Will Durant

It is perhaps the best fruit of philosophy that through it we unlearn the lesson of endless acquisition which an industrial environment so insistently repeats. "Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted."69 A bit of wisdom is a joy forever.

Laws against free speech are subversive of all law; for men will not long respect laws which they may not criticize.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, . . . but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.

A catholic and far-sighted theory of the adjustment of the conflicting factors of life is philosophy.

Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus —"Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps

To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed[.]

If perceptions wove themselves automatically into ordered thought, if mind were not an active effort hammering out order from chaos, how could the same experience leave one man mediocre, and in a more active and tireless soul be raised to the light of wisdom and the beautiful logic of truth?

a man's maturity pays the price of his youth.

If actions only could be made the ground of criminal prosecutions, and words were always allowed to pass free, sedition would be divested of every semblance of justification.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present

The Fijians, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution;

Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be better cultivated to the full if every one that asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, at his own cost and risk.

Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter.

Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy.92 For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it "arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.

I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.

In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet.

It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret . . . .

We shall never have any experience which we shall not interpret in terms of space and time and cause; but we shall never have any philosophy if we forget that these are not things, but modes of interpretation and understanding.

Ruin, comes when the trader, whose heart is lifted up by wealth, becomes ruler

But something of the skepticism that injured my religious faith has overflowed into timid doubts of science

Sostratus built his great lighthouse of white marble, five hundred feet high, as a beacon to all ancient mariners of the Mediterranean, and as one of the seven wonders of the world.

25,000 B.C., the first of the postglacial industries, and the first known culture of Cro-Magnon Man. Bone tools—pins, anvils, polishers, etc.—were now added to those of stone; and art appeared in the form of crude engravings on the rocks, or simple figurines in high relief, mostly of nude women.