A Short History of the World Quotes

“As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Much of the Islamic world, formerly a beacon of progress in a backward world, became seemingly trapped by the limits of scripture, unprepared to accept the value of any teaching or development not expressly mentioned in the Qur’an.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“In the end it was precisely the instability which Europeans had been trying unsuccessfully to evade for so long which had turned out to be their greatest strength. Their wars, their incessant internal struggles, their religious quarrels, all these had been the unfortunate, but necessary condition, of the intellectual growth which had led them, unlike their Asiatic neighbours, to develop the metaphysical and inquiring attitudes towards nature which, in turn, had given them the power to transform and control the worlds in which they lived.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“As the Ottomans grew in power in the Middle East, China missed its opportunity to become the major global power.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals, transferring to humans via fleas or other carriers.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Nobody knows exactly how many stars there are in the Milky Way, but estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion. What’s more, there are purportedly at least 100 billion other galaxies in the known universe. That is a lot of stars and an incredible amount of space if you consider that the average distance between two stars is roughly 30 trillion miles.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“society in which they had a vested interest, and create an entirely new one. While the Bolsheviks promised peace, prosperity, equality and an end to ethnic discrimination, what they in fact delivered was misery, class warfare and civil war.  Even more committed to their cause after the communists executed the tsar and”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Many previous societies have collapsed from over-exploiting their own resources. This is exactly what we are doing now, but on a much larger, global scale. We know the problems that we are storing up for ourselves, but our constant short-term approach and lack of political will to make unpopular decisions mean that we do nothing about it. We live in a state of denial.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Philosophy comes from the Greek words ‘philo’ and ‘sophia’, meaning ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’, and democracy comes from the words ‘demos’ and ‘kratia’, meaning ‘people’ and ‘rule’.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals and then transferred over to humans via fleas or other carriers.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The K-T Extinction of 65 million years ago destroyed the dinosaurs that had already roamed our planet for close to 150 million years.  This puts the six or seven thousand years since the appearance of the first proper human civilisations into perspective.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“the end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Although they still officially deny it, the Turks used the cover of a news blackout to wipe out much of their Christian Armenian population, mainly on forced death marches in which large numbers died of starvation and exhaustion. It is estimated that between 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians and other ethnic minorities were killed or forced to flee between 1915 and 1923 in what was to be the first of many genocides of the 20th century.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“even great progress is unable to prevent man’s inhumanity to man.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“In many ways the Civil War was a battle of elites for economic power.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Africa”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“A person in 1750 could travel no faster than Caesar had travelled 1,800 years previously.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Napoleon became emperor of the French, inviting the Pope to crown him in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, but famously putting the crown on his own head at the last minute in a sign that he was in control not only of France, but also of his own destiny.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Pizarro then reneged on his promises and murdered the king (although not before christening him into the Catholic faith!).”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“in AD 732, when the king of the Franks, Charles Martel, otherwise known as ‘Charles the Hammer’, and a coalition of troops under his leadership, defeated an Umayyad invading army near Poitiers in France. While there is disagreement as to the size of this invading army, world history may have turned out very differently indeed had it not been defeated.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“crossing the Rubicon”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Olmecs.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“suckled”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“it has been estimated that communism was the direct cause of over 100 million deaths in the 20th century or, to put it into perspective, more than those killed in all the wars, revolutions and conflicts in the entire century combined.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Despite the increasing strength of Britain during the”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The earliest evidence that has been found of complex societies comes from Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq and Syria – in around 3500 BC.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Fearful of change, the Iberian peninsula77 failed to develop at the same pace as the rest of Europe and missed out on the Reformation which had done so much to develop the continent.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Spain was also determined to stamp out any free thought or intellectual activity that might challenge Catholicism. With this aim, books were banned,76 students were forbidden to study abroad, and any foreign thought was, by its very nature, unwelcome.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“By the time the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken an estimated 50 percent of the roughly fifteen million African slaves transported to the Americas as cheap labour over a three hundred year period. In fact, up until the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of immigrants to the Americas were African.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The Protestant reformation gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World