Quotes from Andrew Marr

Em apenas vinte e cinco anos, Gengis Khan conquistou uma área maior da superfície da Terra do que aquela que os Romanos conseguiram em quatro séculos, criando (mesmo que por um período muito reduzido) o maior império terrestre da História.

If any important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house . . . submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

Writing a history of the world is a ridiculous thing to do. The amount of information is too vast for any individual to absorb, the reading limitless and the likelihood of error immense. The only case for doing it, and for reading it, is that not having a sense of world history is even more ridiculous.

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life – an unabashed soppiness, if you will – really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.

We humans have been brilliantly clever... almost as clever as we think we are, though not, perhaps, as wise.

We probably wiped out other human types, we certainly wiped out other mammals; and throughout our history we have, in the intervals between making art and love, tried very hard to wipe out each other. We began, and we remain, agents of instability.

Nothing, sad to say, has advanced technical progress faster than war.

No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.

Human history, properly understood, starts when we move from being just another form of prey in the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten, a creature blown about by the natural world, to a creature beginning to shape the world. We move from happens-to, to makes-happen. But

Human history, properly understood, starts when we move from being just another form of prey in the cycle of eat-and-be-eaten, a creature blown about by the natural world, to a creature beginning to shape the world.

Por fim, as acções invasivas da própria colonização destruíram os impérios nativos da Mesoamérica e as culturas costeiras da América do Norte e provocaram vagas de migração. Longe de ser «intemporal» e «indómita», como se pretendia, a América tinha sido um continente bem povoado. A chegada de europeus, do ponto de vista dos habitantes originais, foi uma das grandes catástrofes da História.

Priests of religion. Large-scale building projects. Writing. Taxes. Soldiers. Kings. The ability to make war. All arrive in human history alongside one another, based on the first cities, which are really the first concentrations of stored wealth, themselves based on riverside farming cultures that needed to work together to tame nature.

Adversity favours the versatile.

Diz-se que entre os seus alunos alexandrinos esteve Arquimedes, o matemático e engenheiro que, reza a lenda, foi morto por um soldado romano após o cerco de Siracusa porque se recusou a abandonar um problema que estava a estudar - «Não venha interferir com os meus círculos», teria ele dito.

The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week.

The Sumerians also developed a counting system based on the number sixty, which is divisible by eleven other numbers and so particularly handy for Bronze Age accountancy. From this we get our 60-second minutes, 60-minute hours, 360-day years and 360-degree circles.

Diz-se que Constantino, determinado a não ser feito prisioneiro, se despojou de todas as suas insígnias imperiais, o púrpura e as águias, e se atirou com a sua espada para o meio do mais encarniçado combate, onde rapidamente foi retalhado até morrer.

The words 'lost civilization of Atlantis' are muttered. This is how many modern Europeans like to think of their earlier selves – peaceable, artistic, liberated and romantically doomed – a story that is half-Eden and half the Titanic. But it is almost all bull.

Ned Parminter was in love. He assumed it must be love, because it felt like indigestion – or, to be frank, Irritable Bowel Syndrome – but in a good way.

It took nearly ten thousand years from the first attempts at agriculture for the world's population to reach a billion. Now we are adding extra people at a billion every dozen years.

Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University, a specialist in DNA studies, says: 'Every non-African in Australia, America, Siberia, Iceland, Europe, China, and India can trace their genetic inheritance back to just one line coming out of Africa.

What drives history is the human ambition to alter one's condition to match one's hopes.'3

It has been estimated that a hunter-gatherer needs about ten square miles of game and berry-filled land to live on, whereas agriculture can produce enough calories in a tenth of that space to keep fifty people alive.

It is a sequence familiar in the capitals of other great empires: the extreme inequality created as loot from abroad pours in; the corruption of voting systems and of representative institutions; hoarse cries for change from the streets; the undertow of violence; the mailed fist as the army strides in to 'clean things up'. The imbalance of power created by empire, unbalances the empire itself.