Quotes About History

the Aché were hunted and killed without mercy by Paraguayan farmers.

Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they'd be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of.

History is not deterministic. It is not a means for making accurate predictions. Our present situation was neither natural nor inevitable, and we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.

The ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess Nü Wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5

With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.

artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

White supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics at least until the 1960s. The White Australia policy which restricted immigration of non-white people to Australia remained in force until 1973. Aboriginal Australians did not receive equal political rights until the 1960s, and most were prevented from voting in elections because they were deemed unfit to function as citizens.

Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals.

Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

we need to take full responsibility for the crimes and failings of modernity, from genocides to ecological degradation.

At the close of the twentieth century it appeared that the great ideological battles between fascism, communism and liberalism resulted in the overwhelming victory of liberalism. Democratic politics, human rights and free-market capitalism seemed destined to conquer the entire world. But as usual, history took an unexpected turn, and after fascism and communism collapsed, now liberalism is in a jam. So where are we heading?

Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. Skeletons

mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.

It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1

Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths.

História foi algo que um grupo muito pequeno de pessoas fez, enquanto todos os outros aravam os campos e carregavam baldes de água

The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour.

Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them – and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbours – they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully.

People tended to reconcile themselves to the status quo, declaring that 'this is how it always was, and this is how it always will be'.