Will Durant quotes

Will Durant was an American historian, philosopher, and writer, renowned for his works on the history of civilization. His most famous achievement is "The Story of Civilization," co-authored with his wife, Ariel Durant. He dedicated his life to making history accessible and engaging for general readers. Here are 140 of his quotes:

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Will Durant

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Will Durant

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.

Will Durant

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

India was the mother of our race and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages. She was the mother of our philosophy, mother through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics, mother through Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity, mother through village communities of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Will Durant

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 revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.

Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Will Durant

Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:.

Will Durant

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

Will Durant

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

Will Durant

Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.

Will Durant