Quotes from Will Durant

It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.

History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.

When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

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

One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. "Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

Both Stoicism and Epicureanism—. the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure—were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved;

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?

The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.

The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;