The Lessons of History, by Will and Arial Durant, and published in 1969, remains a worthwhile read today. A favourite of well-known financier Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, the most successful hedge fund manager in the world, Lessons explorers the human experience, and while it covers man's common history, Lessons greatest contribution is that it teaches us to have reasonable expectations for the future - expectations grounded in history. Lessons is only 100 pages and anyone serious about finance should read it. Here are just a few memorable quotes for you to consider:
- "It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed." 13
- "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 superiority has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed." 20
- "Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favour of Christ or against Ghenghis Khan." 46
- "As long as their will be poverty there will be gods." 51
- "We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial re-distribution, In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole off concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." 57
- "The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality." 67
- "The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight" of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities." 94
- "Our capacity for fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being magnificently miserable; there is a stealthily pleasure in rejecting mankind or the universe as unworthy of our approval." 97
- "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. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life." 102