Quotes from Tamim Ansary

World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we" and what we mean by "here and now.

One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means "city of the gods," and it's what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn't.

True language begins when words can join with other words to form an infinite variety of meaningful combinations.

The fact is, we humans don't live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally. That model was already in existence when we were born; we merely made our way into it as we matured. Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.

Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their households. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that a man's honor—which really means his ability to hold his head high among his fellow men—depended on his ability to keep any women associated with him from becoming the objects of other men's sexual fantasies.

In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world's population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.

in times of turmoil, people lose their taste for subtleties and their tolerance for ambiguity.

Europe had come out of the fourteenth century pandemic as a world in flux. In this milieu, it was possible to think the unthinkable. It's hardly accidental that in the wake of the Black Death, movements swelled up to translate the Bible into languages people actually spoke. Many wanted to see for themselves what the scriptures said because it kind of looked like maybe, perhaps, just maybe—here's the unthinkable part: maybe the church had gotten something wrong.

Many religions say to their followers, "The world is corrupt, but you can escape it." Islam said to its followers, "The world is corrupt, but you can change it." p.49.

Necessity, it turns out, isn't really the mother of invention; it's the mother of the process that turns an invention into a product, and in late-eighteenth-century Europe, that mother was ready.

Divine support was not an entitlement; Muslims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and submitting to His will.