Will Durant Quotes - Page 5

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.

In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.

The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.

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.

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

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

Often your face is your autobiography

Nothing is new except arrangement.

The finger that turns the dial rules the air.

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 economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.

India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

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.

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

Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.

Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.

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

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

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

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.