Quote

Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.

Will Durant

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Will Durant
Age: 96 †
Born: 1885
Born: November 5
Died: 1981
Died: November 7
Historian
Philosopher
Writer
North Adams
Massachusetts
William James Will Durant
William James Durant
Progress
Environment
Control
Life
Increasing

More quotes by Will Durant

Image
Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
Will Durant
Image
The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
Will Durant
Image
Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant
Image
A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
Will Durant
Image
The future never just happened. It was created.
Will Durant
Image
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
Will Durant
Image
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.
Will Durant
Image
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.
Will Durant
Image
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Will Durant
Image
The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
Will Durant
Image
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 redistribution.
Will Durant
Image
I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
Will Durant
Image
From barbarism to civilization requires a century from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
Will Durant
Image
Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Will Durant
Image
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.
Will Durant
Image
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Will Durant
Image
History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.
Will Durant
Image
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
Will Durant
Image
The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
Will Durant
Image
If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
Will Durant