Quotes from Will Durant

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

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

Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom—desire coordinated in the light of all experience—can tell us when to heal and when to kill.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic—a moral code independent of religion—strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities?

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions;[69] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit;