Will Durant

"Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one."

"The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history."

"The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past."

"Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain."

"The family is the nucleus of civilization."

"[W]orship, if not the child, is at leastthe brother, of fear."

"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."

"History is an excellent teacher with few pupils."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."