Will Durant

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty certainty is murderous.

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

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

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.

Today's rebel is tomorrow's tyrant.

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

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

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

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Communism is the opiate of the people.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

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

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do right now, and do it. Today is your lucky day.

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

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

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.

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.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

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

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Civilization exists by geological consent subject to change without notice.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

The political machine triumphs because it is united minority acting against a divided majority.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

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

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

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

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

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

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.

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

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.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

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

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.