Will Durant

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

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.

A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

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

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

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.

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.

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

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

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

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