Top 350 Will Durant Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

53. “Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our 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.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

57. “Inquiry is fatal to certainty.”

— Will Durant

58. “Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”

— Will Durant

59. “Nothing is new except arrangement.”

— Will Durant

60. “The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.”

— Will Durant

61. “Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

63. “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.”

— Will Durant

64. “Liberty is a product of order.”

— Will Durant

65. “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.”

— Will Durant

66. “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.”

— Will Durant

67. “There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.”

— Will Durant

68. “Caesar’s armies marched on vegetarian foods.”

— Will Durant

69. “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.”

— Will Durant

70. “Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.”

— Will Durant

71. “History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.”

— Will Durant

72. “When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

76. “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

77. “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

— Will Durant

78. “Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

80. “The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.”

— Will Durant

81. “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.”

— Will Durant

82. “As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

84. “All forms of governments destroy themselves, by carrying their basic principles to excess. Democracies become too free in politics, in economics, in morals – even in literature and art, until at last even the dogs in our homes, rise up on their hind legs and demand their rights. Disorder grows to such a point that society will then abandon all its liberty to anyone who can restore order.”

— Will Durant

85. “Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.”

— Will Durant

86. “Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.”

— Will Durant

87. “The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other.”

— Will Durant

88. “Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.”

— Will Durant

89. “Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.”

— Will Durant

90. “Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.”

— Will Durant

91. “Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.”

— Will Durant

92. “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.”

— Will Durant

93. “In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

95. “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.”

— Will Durant

96. “Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.”

— Will Durant

97. “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.”

— Will Durant

98. “Homer is right: “Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master.” For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: “for men of eminent ability there is no law – they are themselves a law.”

— Will Durant

99. “A book is a friend that will do what no friend does – be silent when we wish to think.”

— Will Durant

100. “I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process.”

— Will Durant