Will Durant Quotes

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the environment. The same individual will behave differently if he comes of age in Detroit, Mich., versus Windsor, Ontario; in New York in the 1980s versus New York now; in a culture of honor versus a culture of dignity.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now.

I consider that there are different degrees of civilization and there are many different ways of expressing it. But one is civilized or is not.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Our criteria for deciding what's good and what's bad is very fickle, especially in this country.

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

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

In modern Western culture, the new is considered better than the old, and thus change itself is considered good; in tradition bound Arab cultures, the old is considered better than the new, and thus the retention of the existing order is good.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

Society's mores have changed, and what used to be thought not to be cruel and unusual now is thought to be cruel and unusual.

Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.

Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted.

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.

There's no such thing as a good or bad culture, it's either a strong or weak culture. And a good culture for somebody else may not be a good culture for you.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition.

When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.