To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Diplomacy
Education is the transmission of civilization.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Civilization, Education
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Learn, Education, Wisdom, Ignorance, Progress, Discover
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Integrity
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Politics
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
—William C. Durant
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Living, Civilization
Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Prejudice
Cultivate your garden … Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony … In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. “Happiness,” said Chamfort, “is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.”
—William C. Durant
Topics: Curiosity, Joy
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Equality
Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Discipline
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.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Patriotism, Country
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Morality, Morals
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Family
The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Ego
Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
—William C. Durant
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Teachers, Teaching
Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Wisdom
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.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Liberty, Forgiveness
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.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Business, Reason
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as the indubitable starting point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to a test of observation or experiment.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Truth
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
—William C. Durant
Topics: History, Silence, Historians, Cleverness
Nothing is new except arrangement.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Plagiarism
What better way is there no make men love one another than to make men understand one another. True charity comes only with clarity-just as mercy is but justice that understands. Surely the root of all evil is the inability to see clearly that which is.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Understanding
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Youth
Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Knowledge, Desire
Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Mistakes, Failures, The Present
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Civilization
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Mind, Acceptance, Wishes, Hope, The Mind, Thinking
No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
—William C. Durant
Topics: Haste
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- James Cash Penney American Entrepreneur
- Walt Disney American Entrepreneur
- J. Paul Getty American Business Person
- Conrad Hilton American Hotelier
- Mary Kay Ash American Entrepreneur
- Seth Godin American Entrepreneur
- Herb Kelleher American Entrepreneur
- Robert Ringer American Entrepreneur
- Lady Bird Johnson First Lady of the United States
- Martha Stewart American Businesswoman
Leave a Reply