Will Durant Quotes

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. The Hindus had […]

Civilization is the order and freedom promoting cultural activity.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

Civilization is a parasite on the man with a hoe.

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

The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states should attempt to dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments that bewilder our brains and unsettle our way today. Laws which were once presented as the decrees of a god-given king are […]

For a time (India) gave a cordial welcome to Christianity; she found in it many ethical ideals that she had honored for thousands of years; and “before the character and behavior of Europeans,” says the blunt Abbe Dubois, “became well known to these people, it seemed possible that Christianity might take root among them.” Throughout […]

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state […]

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.