Quotes from Will Durant

No es la raza la que crea la civilización, es la civilización la que crea el pueblo: las circunstancias geográficas, económicas y políticas crean una cultura, y la cultura crea un tipo humano.

Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation.

The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian;

todos nacemos sin libertad y desiguales: sujetos a nuestra herencia física y psicológica y a las costumbres y tradiciones de nuestro grupo; conformados de forma distinta en cuanto a salud y fuerza, capacidad mental y cualidades de carácter.

For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

Nietzsche remained pious and puritan, chaste as a statue, to the last: therefore his assault on Puritanism and piety. How he longed to be a sinner, this incorrigible saint!

believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.

Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa15—"Let us think no more about them, but look once and pass on.

Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.

Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized;43 or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality.

I do not wish to belittle reason, but it should be the servant of love, not of pride.

The invention of money coöperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property.

45 But above all, the function of art is catharsis, purification: emotions accumulated in us under the pressure of social restraints, and liable to sudden issue in unsocial and destructive action, are touched off and sluiced away in the harmless form of theatrical excitement; so tragedy, "through pity and fear, effects the proper purgation of these emotions.

Political society has made the many the property of the few.

To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

It is clear that as our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever-postponed death."86

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them. Nothing

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art

Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.