History Of Mankind Quotes

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
― Chinua Achebe (Author)

“Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegetarian). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably as 'natural'--and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as justification for them. As with other acts of violence, when it comes to eating meat, we must differentiate between natural and justifiable.”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

“He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“The secrets of evolution, are time and death.

There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Most people are treated as great because there was no social media during their time.”
― Abhaidev, Notes from the Edge of Sanity

“Many collectors died in process of searching for new species, and despite persistent reports that the men died from drowning, gunshot and knife wounds, snakebite, trampling by cattle, or blows in the head with blunt instruments, it is generally accepted that in each case the primary cause of death was orchid fever.”
― Eric Hansen, Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy

“History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living.”
― Isaac Asimov

“We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“Rewrites history, huh?” Mee-Hae gazes at him. The sparkles in her eyes are those of an archaeologist who is living in a forest near her latest discovered underwater civilization. “The last Ice Age was supposed to be twelve thousand years ago.”
― Misba, The Oldest Dance

“When a man's instincts are evil, repentance has a short lease and brief is his gratitude towards those who have done him good.”
― Khuswant Singh

“Emerging from barbarism is a slow process and as man is , geologically speaking, still very young, he has his whole future before him.”
― Theodore Monod, Terre et ciel - Entretiens avec Sylvain Estibal

“The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus provided by most of our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate to today's postcolonial era.”
― James Loewen

“Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros.

A faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.”
― Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto

“Ах, век мифов и легенд. Шарлемань, рыцарство, горный Пиренейский
перешеек, будущее Европы, будущее всего Христианского мира на чаше весов, героический арьергард, рог зовущий на битву, человеческая жизнь, пусть сама по себе ничтожная, пусть всего лишь игрушка в руках случая, но тем не менее вброшена в столкновение более значительных сил. Быть пешкой действительно многое значило во времена, когда на шахматной доске стояли рыцари, епископы и короли, когда пешка могла мечтать о том, чтобы стать королевой, когда черные сражались против белых и над всеми был Бог.
Понимаете теперь, что мы потеряли? Теперь есть только пешки и обе стороны играют серыми.”
― Julian Barnes, Love, etc.

“في الوقت الذي ابتزت فيه اسرائيل, ولا تزال, اوروبا والغرب عموما, وحصلت على كل شيء من الأباتشي الأمريكية حتى القنابل النووية الفرنسية, تعويضا على ما اقترفه النازي من جرائم مشكوك في صحتها ودقتها, تجاه اليهود, وتعويضا عن شتاتهم الذي صنعوه بأنفسهم, فان أكبر وأفظع شتات وعذاب في التاريخ الانساني هو الشتات الأسود الذي أخرج ما يقدره الباحثون بستين مليون إفريقي مات معظمهم في الطريق, هذا الجرم المشهود الذي صنعته تجارة العبيد بأياد اوروبية, عبر الأطلسي, ومن أجل ازدهار مزارع السكر والقطن في أمريكا, لا ينال أكثر من اعتذار خافت !!”
― محمد المخزنجي, جنوبا وشرقا: رحلات ورؤى

“Perhaps the story of the human race is best understood as a journey through particularly hazardous terrain, in the dark, in a not very well-serviced vehicle, with a succession of drivers of varying competence, in assorted states of inebreiation”
― Cyril Aydon

“Power, my young friends, is nothing but fear in disguise. Those who seek power do so because they are afraid — afraid of their own insignificance, afraid of losing control, afraid of facing the truth about themselves.”
― Anton Sammut, The Heirs of the Lost Legacy: A Modern Odyssey in a Forgotten Past

“The Highlanders are Great Thieves”
― Cassius Dio, Roman Historian, 3rd Century A.D.

“When history repeats itself, historians repeat themselves.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Without a knowledge of man's past, his present cannot be understood.”
― Kersey Graves, The Biography of Satan

“Everyone has a story to tell, but gravestones pave the history.”
― Boris Zubry

“belief systems are not chosen
by statesmen on the basis of the quality of church frescos; and alphabets
are created by proselytizers, not at the initiative of those who are prose
lytized.”
― Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

“Yet none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imaginations of human beings.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The great moments in humanity and history have often involved this principle: short-term pain, long-term gain.”
― Bear Grylls

“The IQs of races are consistent with their achievements in the development of early urban civilizations with written languages, systems of arithmetic, and codified laws as shown by Baker (1974), who has documented that only the East Asians, the Europeans, the South Asians and North Africans, and the Southeast Asians developed early civilizations. The less intelligent Native Americans developed a half civilization; and the remaining races failed to develop anything that could be called civilizations. The anomalies of the Pacific Islanders and Arctic Peoples, with their IQs of 90 and 91, neither of which has ever developed anything resembling a civilization, can be explained in the case of the Pacific Islanders as due to their very small and dispersed populations on isolated islands and, in the case of the Arctic Peoples, the severity of their climate, which has made it impossible to sustain urban civilizations. These race differences that Baker (1974) analyzed in the development of early civilizations in the period between approximately BC 4000 and 500 have persisted from 1 AD to the present. Virtually all the advances that have been made in the last two thousand years in science, mathematics, technology, and the arts have been made by the East Asians and the Europeans, with some small input from the South Asians and North Africans.”
― Richard Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis

“If the history of human civilization is viewed as a single, continuous process, then the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps was a brief episode that left no trace. Compared to the vast primeval forests, the corps was nothing more than a few drops of rain falling on the desert.

But when viewed through the lens of a historian looking at the unfolding of events, Bai Mulin was a crucial link. He was one of the few individuals who exerted a profound influence on the direction of human history, but he himself was completely unaware of his place in it. No one knows what ultimately happened to him. For the rest of his life, his name never appeared in any records connecting him to later events. Historians can only determine that after this incident, he left the corps, was transferred to another place, and lived a completely ordinary life until he died.

For Ye Wenjie, however, the direct consequence of Bai’s betrayal was immediate and fatal.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The entire history of humanity has been a struggle between the foolish ideas of the majority and the wise ideas of the minority!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“History remembers the victories of nations, but humanity is carried forward by the quiet courage of ordinary people.”
― Husam Wafaei, The Quiet Inheritance: A Family Saga of Honor, Exile, and the Making of Modern Syria