The Way of the World Quotes

“course all is not well with life in the United States today. The witches’ brew that blends racism, poverty, joblessness, drug addiction, and crime continues to poison part of the society, and to haunt the rest.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“It is a conflict that pits rational interests against irrational emotions. Whatever the outcome, what seems likely to distinguish the twenty-first century from its immediate predecessors and to give it its special character, is that this internal struggle, rather than a conflict between great powers, seems likely to be the overriding issue.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“My own equally broad generalization is that the development of conscience was a theme of ancient times, and the pursuit of freedom, a theme of modern times.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“Today the alternatives are gone: that, perhaps, more than anything else, is what has happened in the last five hundred to a thousand years. Now we’re all in the same boat. It may be a seaworthy boat; but it would be less worrisome if there were more than one.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“Their second enterprise was the modernizing revolution that began with science and went on to industry and technology. Modernization was born in Europe, of rationalism and science. In many respects “Europeanization,” “westernization,” “Americanization,” and “modernization” all mean the same thing.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“back, what happened in modern history was that a millennium ago, Europe began to develop a distinctive mentality. That mentality, rationalism, enabled Europeans to triumph in two enterprises. The first enterprise, after their survey of the rest of the world, was the one just summarized: their settlement or conquest of the globe.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“It was not until our own lifetime that it was seriously recognized that there might be limits to growth, or that there might be costs associated with growth that we cannot afford to pay.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“In the evolutionary process described in the first chapter as “becoming human,” it was the brute traits that came at the beginning and the spiritual ones that came at the end; the first skill was walking, the last one was speaking. So it was with becoming civilized. The Sumerians of the Uruk period gave civilized man, as it were, a body; what still remained was to breathe into him a soul.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“major theme of historical scholarship has been that advances were made possible by the cross-fertilization of cultures, but these are examples that suggest just the opposite: the powerful cultures of Egypt and China show how much can be accomplished by the inward-looking who focus on developing individual national genius while somewhat cut off from the world beyond.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“The rivalry between the land of the Nile and the lands of the Tigris-Euphrates therefore was played out, time and again, in ancient Palestine; it is a geopolitical theme, revived in modern times, that dates from the dawn of civilization.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“The other three independently invented civilizations in Eurasia did it, as the Sumerians did, in the course of bringing rivers under control: the Nile in Egypt; the Indus in the Indian subcontinent; and the Yellow”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“2300 B.C.: a Semitic warrior-king, Sharru-Kin, once a high official of the Sumerian city of Kish, a leader now known from the Bible as Sargon, conquered his neighbors to create the world’s first empire.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“In Sumer, by the millennium after the Uruk period, rulership had become hereditary; and in the millennia that followed, as kings eventually tended to claim that they were divinely anointed, and even that they were gods themselves—as did Naram-Sin of Akkad (c. 2254–c. 2218 B.C.)—the religious and secular powers in the state were united in secular hands. This established the pattern of Middle Eastern politics for”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“Now, for what must have been the first time, a species was altering its behavior independent of external coercions. It was giving up an existing practice of life that still was successful, and in fact was far more in harmony with its environment than the new way.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century