For No Particular Reason, In No Particular Order: Will Durant Quotes...

Apparently the American political experience requires that every thirty or so years we have a Jimmy Carter, or a Jimmy Carter act alike.....or Obama.

I've come to believe that Obama serves the purpose of lessening the harsh judegement the history books will have on Jimmy Carter. Which is kind of like saying that Lee Harvey Oswald soften the image of John Wilkes Booth. Or that General William Westmoreland made history forget some of Colonel George Armstrong Custer's most dire mistakes.

Yes, the Progressive Movement is about the devolution of the harsh historical glare on Progressives of the past. However bad things used to be, Jimmy Carter really wasn't near as bad as Obama.

Or the Fall of Rome will pale in comparison to Mad Max 'The Road Warrior.'

For No Particular Reason, In No Particular Order: Will Durant Quotes...

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
Will Durant

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Will Durant

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

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
Will Durant

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
Will Durant

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
Will Durant


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.
Will Durant

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
Will Durant

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.
Will Durant

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
Will Durant


[edit on 31-7-2010 by fred call]

More Will Durant quotes...

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Will Durant

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant

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

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
Will Durant

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

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

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

The family is the nucleus of civilization.
Will Durant

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
Will Durant

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.
Will Durant

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

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

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
Will Durant

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
Will Durant

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
Will Durant

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

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.
Will Durant

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

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

We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street an Broadway.
Will Durant