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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.

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

“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfed and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around it's base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“I love words, that's all.
And without this - (Holds up pen.)
human history would fall
into a black pit
and there'd be almost no trace of it.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“I love words, that's all.
And without this - (Holds up pen.)
human history would fall
into a black pit
and there'd be almost no trace of it.”
― Martin Crimp, Cyrano de Bergerac: in a free adaptation

“— nothing in the history of mankind is ever repeated, things that at first glance seem the same are scarcely even similar; each individual is a star unto himself, everything happens always and never, all things repeat themselves ad infinitum yet are unique.”
― Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead

“Every history book, no matter how ostensibly objective, is basically lies filtered through bias and a certain amount of relative ignorance.”
― Nancy Pickard, Bum Steer

“History condemns those who give the orders. It forgets those who commit the crimes.”
― T.M Cicinski, The Mind Is Its Own Place

“Князі та вельможі зобов'язані виявляти своє рабство і нікчемність перед царем ще й у тому, що в листах і чолобитних мають підписуватися зменшувальним іменем, наприклад, писати «Івашка», а не Іван, або «Петрушка, твой холоп».”
― Олександр Палій, «Збагнути Росію. Свідчення очевидців»

“The atavistic conundrums of history's footsteps may trespass a while, but they do not linger in the cavernous labyrinth of my mind's diptych.”
― Avijeet Das

“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisɹed and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“All human history he knew was a lie.”
― Bert-Oliver Boehmer, Three Immortals

“A person without even knowledge of the history becomes history.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“The ancient bones of our ancestors are like the roots of a great tree, reminding us to stay firmly grounded in our history. Yet they also inspire us to reach for the heights and achieve our greatest aspirations, like the branches of a tree stretching toward the sky”
― Raigon Stanley