Motherhood Quote by Will Durant

Durant lands the line like a scalpel: coolly observational, faintly sardonic, and morally provocative without announcing a verdict. “Tired mothers” is the key qualifier. He doesn’t frame spanking as a principled philosophy of discipline but as an efficiency hack for the exhausted. The sentence turns on a ruthless domestic calculus: time saved now versus damage stored for later. “Takes less time than reasoning” elevates reasoning into the adult ideal while admitting why it loses in the real world of chores, work, and frayed nerves.

Then he slips in the darker turn: “penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.” It’s a phrase with anatomical bite. “Seat” gestures to the child’s body (the literal target) while also invoking mind and permanence. Durant’s intent isn’t to celebrate corporal punishment so much as to explain its stubborn persistence: pain is fast, legible, and hard to forget. Reasoning, by contrast, requires a shared language, patience, and the belief that a child can be persuaded rather than managed.

The subtext is that family life, like politics, often defaults to coercion when persuasion is costly. Coming from a historian, the line reads as a miniature theory of authority: power justifies itself through results, not ethics, and those results are measured in immediate compliance. The sting of the sentence is that it implicates ordinary virtue. Even decent people, under strain, reach for force because it works. That’s not an excuse; it’s a warning about what exhaustion does to moral ambition.