Wealth & Money Quote by Will Durant

Durant delivers the line like a wink from the archive: the people paid to worship money are, privately, the least sentimental about it. “History is inflationary” isn’t just an economic claim; it’s a historian’s taunt. Over centuries, empires clip coins, governments debase promises, wars get financed, and “stable value” turns out to be a bedtime story we tell savers so they’ll sit still. Bankers, in Durant’s framing, are not sages but seasoned realists: they’ve watched purchasing power leak away in slow motion and learned to treat currency as a tool, not a treasure.

The bite is in the second half. A “wise man” doesn’t hoard money because hoarding assumes the rules won’t change. Durant’s subtext is that the rules always change - politically, technologically, morally. Cash is uniquely vulnerable to decisions made elsewhere: central banks, legislatures, shocks, panics. So the prudent store of value becomes something money can buy but cannot itself be: productive assets, land, knowledge, relationships, institutions, even art. The line also smuggles in a class critique. Bankers “know” this because they’re closest to the machinery that manufactures and manages inflation; ordinary people learn it late, through wages that lag and savings that shrink.

Written by a historian who saw world wars and monetary upheavals, the quote reads less like advice and more like a warning: if you bet your future on the permanence of paper, history will eventually collect the fee.