Politics & Power Quote by Ariel Durant

Durant’s line flatters neither side; it drafts them into the same job. In a political culture addicted to team sports, she frames ideology as function: the conservative isn’t a villainous brake, the radical isn’t a reckless arsonist. They’re opposing muscles in the same body, each useless without the other.

The intent is stabilizing, but not centrist in the lazy, “can’t we all get along” way. Durant is arguing for friction as a feature. “Resists change” sounds reactive, even stubborn, yet she calls it “valuable” because resistance forces proposals to prove they’re more than mood and momentum. A society that changes easily changes cheaply; it swaps principles like fashion. In that light, conservatism becomes a stress test: What breaks when we do this? Who pays? What are the second-order effects?

Then she yanks the radical out of caricature too. “Proposes” is a measured verb: not smashes, not overturns. The radical supplies imagination and moral impatience, a refusal to normalize injustice just because it’s old. Durant’s subtext is that progress isn’t purity; it’s engineering. You need someone drawing blueprints and someone asking whether the bridge collapses in high wind.

Context matters: Durant wrote in the long 20th century, when “change” could mean social liberation or totalitarian catastrophe, and “tradition” could mean inherited wisdom or entrenched cruelty. The sentence reads like a historian’s immune system: keep the organism adaptable, but don’t let it mutate into something unrecognizable. It’s a compact defense of democratic tension - not as gridlock, but as quality control.