14 Quotes by Ariel Durant

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.

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

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

Today’s rebel is tomorrow’s tyrant.

Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

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.

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

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

No man who is in a hurry is quite civilised.