Will Durant

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.

If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

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

A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.

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.

Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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.

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

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

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.

Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.