Will Durant - History Quotes

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History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks our rules; history is baroque.

Will Durant
History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

Will Durant
A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Will Durant
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.

Will Durant
Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, the [bankers] know that history is inflationary.

Will Durant
History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

Will Durant
History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die; and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.

Will Durant
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

Will Durant
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

Will Durant
Human history is a fragment of biology. Man is one of countless millions of species and, like all the rest, is subject to the struggle for existence and the competition of the fittest to survive.

Will Durant
One of the lessons of history is Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Will Durant
There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Will Durant
There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

Will Durant
History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

Will Durant
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Will Durant
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

Will Durant
Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:

That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man;

That to promote harmony in diversity is a responsible task of religion and statesmanship;

That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own;

That by the testimony of history intolerance is the door to violence, brutality and dictatorship; and

That the realization of human interdependence and solidarity is the best guard of civilization.

Will Durant
Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.

Will Durant