Quotes About History

Moriori survivor recalled, "[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep….

En toda América, las enfermedades introducidas con los europeos se propagaron de una tribu a otra mucho antes que los propios europeos, causando la muerte de aproximadamente el 95 por ciento de la población indígena americana precolombina.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

Thus, questions of the animal origins of human disease lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today. (Think of AIDS, an explosively spreading human disease that appears to have evolved from a virus resident in wild African monkeys.) This

In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populations repeatedly exposed to a particular pathogen have come to consist of a higher proportion of individuals with those genes for resistance—just because unfortunate individuals without the genes were less likely to survive to pass their genes on to babies.

literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history.

Descendants of those societies that achieved centralized government and organized religion earliest ended up dominating the modern world. The combination of government and religion has thus functioned, together with germs, writing, and technology, as one of the four main sets of proximate agents leading to history's broadest pattern.

technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other "civilized" area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

Maori began to walk through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected.

For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier.

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

the official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. The latter willingness is one so strongly programmed into us citizens of modern states, by our schools and churches and governments, that we forget what a radical break it marks with previous human history.

Atahuallpa was absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, while Pizarro represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (also known as King Charles I of Spain), monarch of the most powerful state in Europe.

El fanatismo en la guerra, del tipo que impulsó las conquistas cristianas e islámicas que conocemos por la historia, fue probablemente desconocido en la Tierra hasta el surgimiento de las jefaturas y, sobre todo, de los estados en los últimos 6.000 años.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.

Cumulative mortalities of these previously unexposed peoples from Eurasian germs ranged from 50 percent to 100 percent. For instance, the Indian population of Hispaniola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535.

THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science, but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

Already, though, I hope to have convinced you, the reader, that history is not just one damn fact after another, as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to His coattails as He marches past.