Will Durant Quotes

149 quotes in 1756 categories

• What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such…
• So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded…
• In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in…
• 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…
• There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
• Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.
• The failure of the reformation to capture France had left for the Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of…
• We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all…
• 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…
• Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
• India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs,…
• The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to…
• We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that…
• 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…
• Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.
• Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
• 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…
• A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people,…
• If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal…
• [H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

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