Will Durant Quotes

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change.

We emphasize that we believe in change because we were born of it, we have lived by it, we prospered and grew great by it. So the status quo has never been our god, and we ask no one else to bow down before it.

Progress is never accepted by everybody.

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.

The way I look at the world is establishment versus change agents. The establishment is those people who want to keep things the way they are. Change agents are people like me.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

…the burden of proof rests always upon the advocates of change.

The price of doing the same old thing is higher than the price of change.

The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.

There is danger in reckless change; but greater danger in blind conservatism.

Some people like to reform everything they can get their hands on. Others want to fold away and worship whatever is presented to them by the caprice of history.

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

One of the reasons that change takes place is that the people who produce it believe change can take place.

The reformer does not want to move left; he wants to move forward.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me" is a treasured English axiom which, if strictly carried out, would have kept us to wooden ploughs and water clocks. In these days we need to be inoculated with some of the nervous energy of the Americans.