Will Durant History Quotations

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative

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.

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

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

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

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

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