Quotes from Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.

I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.

Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.

Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.