Quotes from Will Durant

The Bourbons might have preserved themselves," said Napoleon, "if they had controlled writing materials. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern social organization.

Kant's greatest merit," says Schopenhauer, "is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself.

Morality must be founded not on theology but on sociology; the changing needs of society, and not any unchanging revelation or dogma, must determine the good.

War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

Such was the end of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.

Religion does not prosper under prosperity;

We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them." Epicurus, then, is no epicurean; he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quiet and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia—tranquillity, equanimity, repose of mind;

Darwin furthered the transformation. As the astronomer had lost the Earth in space, the biologist lost man in the infinity of time, in the long procession of transitory species that had walked the earth or swum the sea or flown the air; man became a mere line in Nature's interminable odyssey. But it was Darwin, too, who opened a way to what John Morley called "the next great task of science—to create a new religion for humanity.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, Quique metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum, Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari—

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

rules were not made for geniuses;

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

La naturaleza ama la diferencia como material necesario para la selección y la evolución;

In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia,—"to look on all things with a mind at peace.

States are built not on the ideals but on the nature of men.

Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable

I know nothing so indecent," he said, "as these vague declamations of the theologians against reason. To hear them one would suppose that men could not enter into the bosom of Christianity except as a herd of cattle enters a stable.

The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.

Old age was not then the abandoned desolation that so often darkens it in an individualistic age. The young never questioned their duty to care for the old; the old remained to the end the first consideration and the last authority; and after their death their graves were honored as long as a male descendant survived. Funerals

He gave the human mind a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom.

On his tombstone only three words were necessary: HERE LIES VOLTAIRE

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. Probably all three doctrines must be combined to find a perfect ethics; but can we doubt which of the elements is fundamental? X. Criticism

Probably every vice was once a virtue … Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Cuando el universo aplaste al hombre, este seguirá siendo más noble que aquel que lo mata, porque sabrá que está muriendo, mientras que de su victoria el universo no sabrá nada».