The Invention of Yesterday Quotes

“The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally. That model was already in existence when we were born; we merely made our way into it as we matured. Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“True language begins when words can join with other words to form an infinite variety of meaningful combinations.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“The first great Greek powers were the Mycenaeans who were basically pirates at first: they sacked Phoenician boats, rammed Cretan ships, and soon had enough goods to go into business for themselves. Around 1500 BCE, they destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete. Their stories describe this as a war with an evil king Minos who kept demanding that the Greeks deliver virgins to him every year until finally the great Greek hero Theseus went over and crushed the bastard and, just to salt the wound, made off with his (virgin) daughter. The Cretan version of this event would probably be different, if we but knew it.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“But there is a distinction to be made between tools and machines. The line may be murky, but it’s there. Think of it this way: tools help us humans do stuff; machines do stuff and we humans help them do it, by shoveling coal into their bellies, by replacing their worn-out parts when necessary, by feeding lumber into their saw teeth, whatever they need.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means “city of the gods,” and it’s what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn’t.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world’s population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“When the Common Era began—by the year one, that is—eight out of every ten humans lived between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the shores of the South China Sea.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Things are more like they are right now than they have ever been.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“That’s the story of life in a nutshell: individuals live, reproduce, and die, but life as a whole expands, branches out, and gains complexity. At least, so far, it always has.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Life is like a constellation, then, the stars of which are molecules. The constellation is not any of its stars but the order among them all.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Life, then, is a closed system within a surrounding environment: it has an internal order among its parts, which transforms its many molecules into a single whole. This is true of every life-form. A cell. A frog. A human being. You name it.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“It’s all too easy for us modern folks to say the constellations weren’t really there. Yes, it’s true that those constellations existed only in the minds of the people looking, but then, everything we see and know as human beings is in some sense a constellation: it’s there because we see it. We exist as constellations of people. We’re immersed in constellations of ideas. We live in a universe of constellations, which are themselves made up of constellations. In the social universe, constellations are as real as it gets.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Information that fits with everything else we know has a leg up on feeling true. Just”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Europe had come out of the fourteenth century pandemic as a world in flux. In this milieu, it was possible to think the unthinkable. It’s hardly accidental that in the wake of the Black Death, movements swelled up to translate the Bible into languages people actually spoke. Many wanted to see for themselves what the scriptures said because it kind of looked like maybe, perhaps, just maybe—here’s the unthinkable part: maybe the church had gotten something wrong.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection