Ariel Durant > Quotes

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
― Ariel Durant

“We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.”
― Ariel 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 Lessons of History

“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, The Lessons of History

“History is subject to geology.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“Man, not earth, makes civilization.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility and political power.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“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 these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“[H]istory is baroque.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and in much wisdom is much grief.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History