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
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income.
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
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.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.
A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
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.
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
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.
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
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.
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.
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.
We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.
There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Education is the transmission of civilization.
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.
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
