Daily Inspiration Quote by Will Durant

Durant is doing the historian's version of pulling the rug: he treats morality not as a fixed court of law, but as a costume drama where the same human impulses keep changing outfits. The line is deliberately unsettling because it refuses the comforting idea that "vice" is inherently and permanently bad. Instead, he frames it as a category society manufactures, revises, and re-legitimizes when convenient.

The clever move is the hinge in the middle: "once a virtue" and "may become respectable again". That temporal arc turns ethics into politics. Traits we condemn in peacetime - aggression, deception, ruthlessness, tribal loyalty - can be repackaged as courage, strategy, realism, patriotism. The wartime example isn't just vivid; it's a proof case. Hatred is normally a social poison, yet war gives it an official uniform, a flag, and a moral storyline. It becomes not merely tolerated but demanded, even performed as civic duty.

Subtext: Durant is warning against moral smugness. If categories flip this easily, then today's righteous consensus is less a revelation than an arrangement. He's also indicting institutions - states, churches, media, crowds - that launder impulses by renaming them. "Respectable" is the key word: not "good", not "true", but socially sanctioned.

Context matters: writing across the age of total war and mass propaganda, Durant had ample evidence that modern societies can mobilize moral language with industrial efficiency. The quote is a reminder that history doesn't only record atrocities; it records the arguments that made them feel acceptable.