If you are looking for quotes from The Lessons of History book written by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, then you are right place. Here we have collected one of the best The Lessons of History quotes which are mentioned below.
Table of Contents
Best 83 The Lessons of History Quotes
A cynic remarked that “you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of. – Will Durant
A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have. – Will Durant
All economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation. – Will Durant
All strong characters and peoples are race conscious and are instinctively averse to marriage outside their own racial group. – Will Durant
Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation – Will Durant
As long as there is poverty, there will be gods. – Will Durant
But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind. – 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
Centripetal organization unifying a culture in all its phases into a unique, coherent, and artistic form; the other a period of centrifugal disorganization in which creed and culture decompose in division and criticism, and end in a chaos of individualism, skepticism, and artistic aberrations. – Will Durant
Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. – Ariel Durant
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty. – Will Durant
Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. – Will Durant
For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. – Will Durant
Generally religion and puritanism prevail in periods when the laws are feeble and morals must bear the burden of maintaining social order; skepticism and paganism (other factors being equal) progress as the rising power of law and government permits the decline of the church, the family, and morality without basically endangering the stability of the state. – Will Durant
Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows. – Will Durant
History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment. – Will Durant
History is baroque. – 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
History is subject to geology. – Ariel 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
Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation. – Will Durant
If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. 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; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world. – Will Durant
If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war. – Will Durant
In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty. – Will Durant
In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. – Will Durant
In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history. – Will Durant
Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. – Will Durant
It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. – Will Durant
It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that “you can’t fool all the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. – Will Durant
It was fear that first made the gods”25 —fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. – Will Durant
Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically. – Will Durant
Life must breed. – Will Durant
Magnanimity in politics,” said Edmund Burke, “is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together. – Will Durant
Man, not earth, makes civilization. – Ariel Durant
Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall. – Will Durant
Men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt. – Will Durant
Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order. – Will Durant
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. – 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
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. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically. – Will Durant
Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other…. – Will Durant
Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy. – Will Durant
Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed. – Will Durant
Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed. – Will Durant
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
Other factors equal, internal liberty varies inversely as external danger. – Will Durant
Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. – Will Durant
Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale. – Will Durant
Pascal: “When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing. – Will Durant
Perhaps it is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they (bankers) know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard. – Will Durant
Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions. – Will Durant
Plato’s reduction of political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship found another illustration in the history of Rome. – Will Durant
Probably every vice was once a virtue … Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall. – Will Durant
Probably every vice was once a virtue—i.e., a quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall. – Will Durant
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. – Will Durant
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. – Will Durant
Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination. – Will Durant
Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man. – Will Durant
The advances of agricultural and contraceptive technology in the nineteenth century apparently refuted Malthus: in England, the United States, Germany, and France the food supply kept pace with births, and the rising standard of living deferred the age of marriage and lowered the size of the family. – 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
The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend. – Will Durant
the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional. – Will Durant
The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact…Man, not the earth, makes civilization. – Ariel 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 revolutionists 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
The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”5”. – Will Durant
The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty. – Will Durant
The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival. – Will Durant
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. – Will Durant
There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. – Will Durant
There is no humorist like history. – Will Durant
To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed. – Will Durant
Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage. – Will Durant
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. – Will Durant
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed. – Will Durant
War is a nation’s way of eating. – Will Durant
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. – 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 recirculation. – Will Durant
We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic—a moral code independent of religion—strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? – Will Durant
We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind. – Will Durant
We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities. – Ariel Durant
When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing. – Will Durant
You can’t fool all the people all the time,” but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. – Will Durant
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