“Sex is a River of Fire”, Will and Ariel Durant

While President of Brigham Young University, Jeffrey R. Holland shared with quote from the great historians, Will and Ariel Durant:

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 35–36