Top 350 Will Durant Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.”

— Will Durant

102. “Man’s duty, says the Avesta, is three-fold: “To make him who is an enemy a friend; to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned.”76.”

— Will Durant

103. “So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.”

— Will Durant

104. “Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

106. “Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole.”

— Will Durant

107. “Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.”

— Will Durant

108. “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.”

— Will Durant

109. “Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation.”

— Will Durant

110. “Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

— Will Durant

111. “In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”

— Will Durant

112. “In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.”

— Will Durant

113. “In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.”

— Will Durant

114. “The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.”

— Will Durant

115. “The story of the “bondage” in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape – or emigration – to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East.”

— Will Durant

116. “The finger that turns the dial rules the air.”

— Will Durant

117. “The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs; diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought; superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.”

— Will Durant

118. “Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals.”

— Will Durant

119. “The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

122. “Facts” replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.”

— Will Durant

123. “The greatest task of morals is always sexual regulation; for the reproductive instinct creates problems not only within marriage, but before and after it, and threatens at any moment to disturb social order with its persistence, its intensity, its scorn of law, and its perversions.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

125. “In books “we converse with the wise, as in action with fools.” That is, if we know how to select our books. “Some books are to be tasted,” reads a famous passage, “others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”; all these groups forming, no doubt, an infinitesimal portion of the oceans and cataracts of ink in which the world is daily bathed and poisoned and drowned.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

127. “For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.”

— Will Durant

128. “It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.”

— Will Durant

129. “How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.”

— Will Durant

130. “A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a co-operative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.”

— Will Durant

131. “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

132. “Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist.”

— Will Durant

133. “A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.”

— Will Durant

134. “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.”

— Will Durant

135. “When a simpleton abused him, Buddha listened in silence; but when the man had finished, Buddha asked him: “Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?” The man answered: “To him who offered it.” “My son,” said Buddha, “I decline to accept your abuse, and request you to keep it for yourself.”

— Will Durant

136. “If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.”

— Will Durant

137. “Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,′ people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and ‘he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.’ Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.”

— Will Durant

138. “He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.59 Such.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

140. “Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation. Is.”

— Will Durant

141. “Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game.”

— Will Durant

142. “The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.”

— Will Durant

143. “Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.”

— Will Durant

144. “War does one good – it teaches people geography.”

— Will Durant

145. “If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. 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; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”

— Will Durant

146. “Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.”

— Will Durant

147. “A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.”

— Will Durant

148. “Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.”

— Will Durant

149. “Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.”

— Will Durant

150. “Communism is the opiate of the people.”

— Will Durant