Ariel Durant Quotes

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

Today's rebel is tomorrow's tyrant.

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.

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

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

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.

The laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history.

Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.

When his apprenticeship was finished (the candidate for Knighthood) was received into the Knightly Order by a ritual of sacramental awe.