Will Durant - The Lessons of History (1968)

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If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.

Will Durant
If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

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

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
All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

Will Durant
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

Will Durant
Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

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

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
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

Will Durant
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.

Will Durant
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.

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

Will Durant
By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

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
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

Will Durant