Humanity and The Pace of Change

Favorite Quotes from Will and Ariel Durant, "The Lessons of History"

• Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat.

• As his studies come to a close the historian faces the challenge: Of what use have your studies been? Have you found in your work only the amusement of recounting the rise and fall of nations and ideas, and retelling "sad stories of the death of kings"? Is it possible that, after all, history has no sense, that it teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale?

• Do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history a fable not quite agreed upon? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians...

• 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.

• ...An element of chance, perhaps of freedom, seems to enter into the conduct of metals and men. We are no longer confident that atoms, much less organisms, will respond in the future as we think they have responded in the past. The electrons, like Cowper's God, move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform, and some quirk of character or circumstance may upset national equations....