Ariel Durant
Ariel Durant was a Russian-born American researcher and writer, the co-author of The Story of Civilization with her husband Will Durant.
Ariel Durant was born in Proskurov, Russian Empire (now Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) as Chaya Kaufman to Jewish parents Ethel Appel Kaufman and Joseph Kaufman. The family emigrated to the United States in 1901. She met her future husband while a student at Ferrer Modern School in New York City. Will was then a teacher at the school, but resigned his post to marry Ariel, who was fifteen at the time of the wedding on October 31, 1913.
Ariel and Will Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1968 for Rousseau and Revolution, the tenth volume of The Story of Civilization. In 1977 they were presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford, and Ariel was named "Woman of the Year" by the city of Los Angeles.
Ariel Durant and her husband Will died within two weeks of each other in 1981, and are buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
“The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact...Man, not the earth, makes civilization.”
“We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.”
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
“If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.”
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”