The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

Is it possible that, after all, “history has no sense,”1 that it teaches us nothing, and that the immense past was only the weary rehearsal of the mistakes that the future is destined to make on a larger stage and scale?

“Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

“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.”

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”5

History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.”6 Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.

man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army,

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions.

Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.