{"author":"Will Durant","author_id":"Will+Durant","total_quotes":98,"quotes":[{"text":"War does one good—it teaches people geography.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["geography","history","war"],"id":724,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice. ","author":"Will Durant","tags":["humor","philosphy","science"],"id":5642,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["action"],"id":10092,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["history"],"id":18114,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["history","philosophy-of-history"],"id":18990,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"When liberty destroys order  the hunger for order will destroy liberty.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["order","organization"],"id":27263,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["disillusionment","fallibility","humility","realism"],"id":31607,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["civilization","superstition"],"id":37246,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say 'Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["islam","islamic","muhammad","muhammad-pbuh","muhammed"],"id":45306,"author_id":"Will+Durant"},{"text":"But he had expressed to Mme. Du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.","author":"Will Durant","tags":["data","history","information","intellectual-history","narrative","past","philosophy","voltaire"],"id":58217,"author_id":"Will+Durant"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":98,"pages":10,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}