Ariel Durant Quotes

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

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.

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.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.

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.

A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another, and may erupt in blood or print, irrevocably.

Man, not earth, makes civilization.

History is subject to geology.

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.

The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant,

A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel 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 these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

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.

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

and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and over again throughout history.

gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History.

I gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and over again throughout history.

History Lesson First published in Startling Stories, May 1949 Collected in Expedition to Earth as ‘Expedition to Earth’ The second of two stories derived from an earlier one, now lost, ‘History Lesson’ is also the first of two stories in which glaciers return to cover the world. In the preface to Expedition to Earth, Clarke notes his discovery of a literally chilling phrase in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilisation: ‘Civilisation is an interlude between Ice Ages’, and observes ‘the next one is already overdue; perhaps global warming has arrived just in time to save us.

Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the Sahara; he can level or surmount mountains and terrace the hills with vines; he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a tornado can ruin in an hour the city that took a century to build; an iceberg can overturn or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the Great Certainty.

done. Every time I go to China, we meet for sixty to ninety minutes. We talk about what’s happening in the world, and how that relates to thousands of years of history and the never-changing nature of mankind. We discuss a wide range of other topics as well, ranging from physics to artificial intelligence. We are both keenly interested in how most everything happens over and over again, the forces behind those patterns, and the principles that work and don’t work in dealing with them. I gave Wang a copy of Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because he is a classic hero and I thought it might help him. I also gave him The Lessons of History, a 104-page distillation of the major forces through history by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by the insightful Richard Dawkins, which explains how evolution works. He gave me Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History. All these books showed how the same things happened over and

History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.

Ya no, ya no, ya no me sirves, zapato negro, en el cual he vivido como un pie durante treinta años, pobre y blanca, sin atreverme apenas a respirar o hacer achís. Papi: he tenido que matarte. Te moriste antes de que me diera tiempo… Pesado como el mármol, bolsa llena de Dios, lívida estatua con un dedo del pie gris, del tamaño de una foca de San Francisco. Y la cabeza en el Atlántico extravagante en que se vierte el verde legumbre sobre el azul en aguas del hermoso Nauset. Solía rezar para recuperarte. Ach, du. En la lengua alemana, en la localidad polaca apisonada por el rodillo de guerras y más guerras. Pero el nombre del pueblo es corriente. Mi amigo polaco dice que hay una o dos docenas. De modo que nunca supe distinguir dónde pusiste tu pie, tus raíces: nunca me pude dirigir a ti. La lengua se me pegaba a la mandíbula. Se me pegaba a un cepo de alambre de púas. Ich, ich, ich, ich, apenas lograba hablar: Creía verte en todos los alemanes. Y el lenguaje obsceno, una locomotora, una locomotora que me apartaba con desdén, como a un judío. Judío que va hacia Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. Empecé a hablar como los judíos. Creo que podría ser judía yo misma. Las nieves del Tirol, la clara cerveza de Viena, no son ni muy puras ni muy auténticas. Con mi abuela gitana y mi suerte rara y mis naipes de Tarot, y mis naipes de Tarot, podría ser algo judía. Siempre te tuve miedo, con tu Luftwaffe, tu jerga pomposa y tu recortado bigote y tus ojos arios, azul brillante. Hombre-panzer, hombre-panzer: oh Tú... No Dios, sino un esvástica tan negra, que por ella no hay cielo que se abra paso. Cada mujer adora a un fascista, con la bota en la cara; el bruto, el bruto corazón de un bruto como tú. Estás de pie junto a la pizarra, papi, en el retrato tuyo que tengo, un hoyo en la barbilla en lugar de en el pie, pero no por ello menos diablo, no menos el hombre negro que me partió de un mordisco el bonito corazón en dos. Tenía yo diez años cuando te enterraron. A los veinte traté de morir para volver, volver, volver a ti. Supuse que con los huesos bastaría. Pero me sacaron de la tumba, y me recompusieron con pegamento. Y entonces supe lo que había que hacer. Saqué de ti un modelo, un hombre de negro con aire de Meinkampf, e inclinación al potro y al garrote. Y dije sí quiero, sí quiero. De modo, papi, que por fin he terminado. El teléfono negro está desconectado de raíz, las voces no logran que críe lombrices. Si ya he matado a un hombre, que sean dos: el vampiro que dijo ser tú y me estuvo bebiendo la sangre durante un año, siete años, si quieres saberlo. Ya puedes descansar, papi. Hay una estaca en tu negro y grasiento corazón, y a la gente del pueblo nunca le gustaste. Bailan y patalean encima de ti. Siempre supieron que eras tú. Papi, papi, hijo de puta, estoy acabada.

The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition

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. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal.

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. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.

[H]istory is baroque.

pugnacity, greed, brutality, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue

we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves

Historians Will and Ariel Durant have written in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation that at the time of Luther, “a gallon of beer per day was the usual allowance per person, even for nuns.” This may help to explain why beer figures so prominently in the life and writings of the great reformer. He was German, after all, and he lived at a time when beer was the European drink of choice. Moreover, having been freed from what he considered to be a narrow and life-draining religious legalism, he stepped into the world ready to enjoy its pleasures to the glory of God. For Luther, beer flowed best in a vibrant Christian life.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, which, he testified, was like “taking a whiff of something that simply opens your nostrils except that it happened in my brain.

We may make contact with ambitious species on other planets or stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one.

Ariel Durant, “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” The Durants add a foreboding remark, “The greatest question of our time is . . . whether men can live without God.” Amid such confusion, Christians should be positioned to provide the guidance our society needs. With regret I must say frankly that I doubt that will happen. Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source. That reality introduces major problems for lawmakers. And it raises major questions for believers too. How should we relate to, and communicate faith to, those who see the world so differently?

Conforme avanza la industria en gran escala, la creación de la riqueza real depende menos del tiempo de trabajo y la cantidad de trabajo invertida que del poder de los agentes puestos en acción durante el tiempo de trabajo.

Truth is something worth having well-formed convictions about. Much is at stake. Historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote that “a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.

Durant la puberté, les femmes prennent conscience des paramètres à long terme de leurs rencontres sexuelles, et si elles ne les comprennent pas immédiatement, elles paient le prix de leur manque de compréhension. Il n'y a aucune occasion biologique comparable pour aider les hommes à dépasser leur penchant pour le gain à court terme et le transfert des coûts à long terme vers les autres -les femmes, les autres groupes sociaux, l'environnement.

Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like –Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi–volume history of the world with her husband Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim Ariel Durant was an uneducated person?

La reducción de la pobreza en nuestro planeta ha sido, durante el último cuarto de siglo, espectacular. Si en 1990 algo más de un tercio de la población mundial (1.900 millones de personas) vivía en condiciones de extrema pobreza, hoy son alrededor de 650 millones. Si hace treinta años algo más de 1.500 millones de esas personas extremadamente pobres vivían en el continente asiático (especialmente el sur y el este), hoy suman alrededor de 100 millones. Y es que en lo que va de siglo esta variable se ha desplomado y va camino de la desaparición.

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.

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

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and in much wisdom is much grief.

الدرس الأول الذي تلقيه علينا الفلسفة هو أننا قد نكون جميعاً مخطئين.

All of the history of humankind is a short chapter in the history of biology. And all of biology is a short chapter in the history of the planet. And the planet is a short chapter in the history of the universe. —Will and Ariel Durant