Quotes About History

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.

At the age of three and a half the Taung Child was eaten by an eagle. The evidence is that damage marks to the eye sockets of the fossil are identical to marks made by modern eagles on modern monkeys as they rip out their eyes. Poor little Taung Child, shrieking on the wind as you were borne aloft by the aquiline fury, you would have found no comfort in your destined fame, two and a half million years on, as the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus.

it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

As guerras religiosas são combatidas em nome da religião, e é terrível como elas são frequentes na história. Não consigo pensar em nenhuma guerra que tenha sido combatida em nome do ateísmo.

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.

And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.

I shall be using the name 'history-deniers' for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world's age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.

The history-deniers themselves are among those I am trying to reach in this book. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those are not history-deniers but know some - perhaps members of their own family or church - and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

It is a matter of history that the spread of Islam, from Arabia throughout the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, was due to military conquest. And the same goes for the spread of Christianity by the Spanish conquerors in South and Central America

A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.

It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used—against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them—to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.

Obviously, the vast majority of evolutionary change is invisible to direct eye-witness observation. Most of it happened before we were born, and in any case, it is usually too slow to be seen during an individual's lifetime.

Here are some dates at which women were granted the vote:   New Zealand 1893 Australia 1902 Finland 1906 Norway 1913 United States 1920 Britain 1928 France 1945 Belgium 1946 Switzerland 1971 Kuwait 2006

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally 'respected'.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent

It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck.

It is a commonplace that good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Before writing was invented and before scientific archaeology started, word-of-mouth storytelling, with all its Chinese Whispery distortions, was the only way people learned about history.

Hitler no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century technology at his disposal.