Quote

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution 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 the old.

Will Durant

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Will Durant
Age: 96 †
Born: 1885
Born: November 5
Died: 1981
Died: November 7
Historian
Philosopher
Writer
North Adams
Massachusetts
William James Will Durant
William James Durant
Natural
Prejudice
Privileges
Power
Possession
Possessions
May
Raises
Instincts
Men
Destroy
Minority
Privilege
Inequality
Instinct
Minorities
Soon
Essentially
Land
Creates
Redistribution

More quotes by Will Durant

Image
It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
Will Durant
Image
As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
Will Durant
Image
If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.
Will Durant
Image
Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
Will Durant
Image
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Will Durant
Image
Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.
Will Durant
Image
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Will Durant
Image
That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
Will Durant
Image
Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.
Will Durant
Image
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
Will Durant
Image
When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
Will Durant
Image
The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
Will Durant
Image
Even when repressed, inequality grows only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
Will Durant
Image
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Will Durant
Image
Nothing is new except arrangement.
Will Durant
Image
India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
Will Durant
Image
Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.
Will Durant
Image
Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
Will Durant
Image
It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
Will Durant
Image
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
Will Durant