Quotes About Society

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years.

The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. "Modern" conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history; all human societies have been traditional for far longer than any society has been modern.

these we killed, and others we killed—but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.

a society's fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.

I am thus optimistic that historical studies of human societies can be pursued as scientifically as studies of dinosaurs—and with profit to our own society today, by teaching us what shaped the modern world, and what might shape our future.

WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us

tests of cognitive ability (like IQ tests) tend to measure cultural learning and not pure innate intelligence, whatever that is.

Jared Diamond

society's structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole.

One of the conclusions that we saw emerging from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing society and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.

Jared Diamond

Similarly, throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

For example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span, but receive much less social support from friendships and extended families. My motive for investigating these geographic differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over another but simply to understand what happened in history.

The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.

Probably all humans lived in bands until at least 40,000 years ago, and most still did as recently as 11,000 years ago.

example, compared with hunter-gatherers, citizens of modern industrialized states enjoy better medical care, lower risk of death by homicide, and a longer life span

The strong individualism of U.S. society allows successful inventors to keep earnings for themselves, whereas strong family ties in New Guinea ensure that someone who begins to earn money will be joined by a dozen relatives expecting to move in and be fed and supported.

THE LIMITED USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution.

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

In a society that espouses tolerance, it's amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.

throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence.

In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.