THE LESSONS OF HISTORY by Will Durant, Ariel 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.”
• Let us define history, in its troublesome duplexity, as the events or record of the past.
• When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.
• Man, not the earth, makes civilization.
• So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
• Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.
• Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride.
• War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. 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.
• The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.
• Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.
• The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed.
• 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.
• Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states.
• We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind. The most basic tendencies we shall call instincts, though we recognize that much doubt has been cast upon their inborn quality.
• History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.
• 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.
• It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.
• 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, security, and growth.
• Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions.
• History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.
• Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of Assyria17 to the “night clubs” of West-European and American cities today.
• men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt; probably less now than generally before.
• We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written (peccavimus) is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional.
• Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age.
• Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.
• Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan.
• The growing awareness of man’s minuscule place in the cosmos has furthered the impairment of religious belief.
• One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection.
• History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action—the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities.
• The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.
• Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.
• The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history.
• The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historic rhythm in the concentration and dispersion of wealth.
• Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands.
• Power naturally converges to a center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread,
• To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may follow the shock of sudden blows or mutilations.
• In strict usage of the term, democracy has existed only in modern times, for the most part since the French Revolution.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
• The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery.
• The state has our instincts without our restraints.
• The individual submits to restraints laid upon him by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference, because the state guarantees him basic protection in his life, property, and legal rights.
• The state itself acknowledges no substantial restraints, either because it is strong enough to defy any interference with its will or because there is no superstate to offer it basic protection, and no international law or moral code wielding effective force.
• History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in a primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less predictable.
• There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.
• Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.
• Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming.
• Resilient man picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his memories with him.
• One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build.
• Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy of our approval.
• Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.
• progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.