Will Durant (Quotes)

The populace is always more royalist than the king.

Woman had domesticated the sheep, the dog, the ass, and the pig; now she domesticated man. Man is woman's last domestic animal, only partially and reluctantly civilized.

The belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up.

No nation is ever defeated in its textbooks.

Christian astronomers in the thirteenth century pictured the planets as revolving about the earth... the center and summit of the universe was that same man whom the theologians described as a miserable worm tainted with sin and mostly doomed to hell.

History, like nature, knows only continuity amid change. History makes no leaps.

The first principle of government is good example; to improve his people the ruler must make himself a model of intelligence and good will.

Thrift is a virtue which, like most others, must be practiced with discrimination.

We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past for the same reason that we magnify the crime and immorality of the present—because cruelty is interesting by its very rarity.

The soul of the simple man can be moved only through the senses and the imagination, by ceremony and miracle, by myth and fear and hope; he will reject or transform any religion that does not give him these.

Rome itself had only two large factories—a paper mill and a dyeing establishment; probably neither meals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry.

Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another.

There is always, in any society, a minority whose instincts rejoice in the permission to persecute; it is a release from civilization.

A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.

Those who can worship God in spiritual love, entertaining neither hope nor fear, are the highest of mankind; but they will reveal this attitude only to their maturest students, not to the multitude.

[Charlemagne] rarely entertained, preferring to hear music or the reading of a book while he ate. Like every great man he valued time; he gave audiences and heard cases in the morning while dressing and putting on his shoes.

The function of history is to illuminate the present through the past.

Originality is not parthenogenesis; it is, like parentage, a novel combination of pre-existing elements.

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

Every extended frontier of empire or knowledge opens up new problems.