Will Durant Quotes

Preserve your history and become everlasting; receive new life from the times that have gone by.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

It takes only a few seconds to make history new again.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

If every human being disappeared off the face of the earth in an instant, the earth would still keep spinning and the planet would develop new life forms.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.

A concerted effort to preserve our heritage is a vital link to our cultural, educational, aesthetic, inspirational, and economic legacies - all of the things that quite literally make us who we are.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

I really don’t make history; I preserve it.

It may not be art, but it is history.

All states need to hallow themselves with the dignity of the past.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one....

The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world …. our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it

If all greatness lies in the past, what is the point of the future?

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

You can’t just wave a magic wand and make our history go away..

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

It is important never to forget our history, but parts of our history are more appropriately displayed in museums, not on government property.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.