The voices / 84 fragments

Will Durant

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01Undated

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Will Durant / quote

02Undated

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

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03Undated

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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04Undated

Civilization is not inherited it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

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05Undated

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

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06Undated

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

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07Undated

War does one good—it teaches people geography.

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08Undated

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.

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09Undated

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.

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10Undated

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development.

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11Undated

Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,' people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and 'he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.' Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.

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12Undated

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

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13Undated

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.

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14Undated

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

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15Undated

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.

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16Undated

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.

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17Undated

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 recirculation.

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18Undated

[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.

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19Undated

[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy.

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20Undated

The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East.

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21Undated

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.

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22Undated

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.

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23Undated

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

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24Undated

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

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