Quotes About Transition

God is dead – it's just taking a while to get rid of the body.

By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution

The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts, and therefore cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings. Nothing in the comfortable lives of the urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt. Every new invention just puts another mile between us and the Garden of Eden.

Cuanto más hemos trabajado para construir algo, más difícil es abandonarlo y hacer sitio a algo nuevo.

The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families.

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over.

The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come.

Humanity has very little time left to wean itself from fossil fuels.

De repente damos muestra de un interés sin precedentes por la suerte de las llamadas formas de vida inferiores, quizá porque estamos a punto de convertirnos en una de ellas.

Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.

La cultura puede transformarse en respuesta a cambios en su ambiente o mediante la interacción con culturas vecinas. Sin embargo, las culturas también experimentan transiciones debido a sus propias dinámicas internas.

what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.

When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn't upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.

We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.

Evolution moulded our minds and bodies to the life of hunter-gatherers. The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts, and therefore cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides.

Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The

nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house.

The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.