Quotes About Geography

Colorado's right next to Utah - you know, Mormon Central.

I'm not usually vain about my body. It's like Pennsylvania: The same way the Keystone State comprises Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with not much in between, I've got good legs and shapely eyebrows, and it's kind of a wasteland outside of that.

During the Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great lake.

Surprisingly few outsiders know about the Cuckmere Valley, and it is not uncommon for people to confuse Alfriston with Alfreton in the Derbyshire Peak District.

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

1,000 out of the world's 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas

the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.

The histories of the Fertile Crescent and China also hold a salutary lesson for the modern world: circumstances change, and past primacy is no guarantee of future primacy. One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world, now that ideas diffuse everywhere instantly on the Internet and cargo is routinely airfreighted overnight between continents.

the north–south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Americas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

This very unequal distribution of wild ancestral species among the continents became an important reason why Eurasians, rather than peoples of other continents, were the ones to end up with guns, germs, and steel.

Hence one wonders whether Austronesians, instead of taking the easier route to Madagascar via India and East Africa, somehow (incredibly) sailed straight across the Indian Ocean, discovered Madagascar, and only later got plugged into East African trade routes. Thus, some mystery remains about Africa's most surprising fact of human geography.

The Americas span a much greater distance north–south (9,000 miles) than east–west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. That is, the major axis of the Americas is north–south. The same is also true, though to a less extreme degree, for Africa. In contrast, the major axis of Eurasia is east–west. What effect, if any, did those differences in the orientation of the continents' axes have on human history?

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

For example, Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at about the same latitude but lying successively 4,000 miles east or west of each other, are more similar to each other in climate than each is to a location lying even a mere 1,000 miles due south.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile.

Geography shapes history; men only add a little colour to its surface.

Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they´re all identical and reading from the same rulebook. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules - and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?

I prefer home-schooling because you can work at your own pace and go towards more what you're interested in, whether it be history or geography or math.

Nature, I have constantly argued in my work, is the real superpower of this godless universe. It is the ultimate disposer of human fate, randomly recarving geography over 10,000-year epochs.

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.

You have got the right strategy, the right geography; you have got the right customers. You need to prioritise them better; we need to grow them better, mind them better. We need to give more value to them, and we need to execute a lot of areas in the organisation where we are not executing.