# The Lessons of History  ## Metadata - Author: [[Will Durant and Ariel Durant]] - Full Title: The Lessons of History - Category: #books ## Highlights - Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue—i.e., a quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=371)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The longest-lasting regime of socialism yet known to history was set up by the Incas in what we now call Peru, at some time in the ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=717)) - Tags: [[pink]] - There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=819)) - Tags: [[pink]] - There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must challenge a thousand evil precedents, and dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations, as the Buddhist King Ashoka did (262 B.C.),64 ([Location 981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=981)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=1016)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Friedrich Nietzsche went insane with this vision of “eternal recurrence.” ([Location 1024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=1024)) - Tags: [[pink]] - absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will (which ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=1071)) - If 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. ([Location 1216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=1216)) - Tags: [[pink]] - To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. ([Location 1219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008GUIEYU&location=1219)) - Tags: [[pink]]