Land Quotes

“The future is a foreign country :
they will do things differently there.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“how humankind will ever be able to answer to God for the wounds inflicted on His world.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“But to all of this the land itself remain sturdily indifferent and unmoved, the human behavior played out on its surfaces merely trivia. Except, of course, where human behavior induces changes to the ferocity of the weather and the levels of the sea, and land may then fall victim to the climate, and has to alter its shape and size as a result.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“The future is a foreign country :
they will do things differently there.”
― Simon Winchester;, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“No American, so far as I am aware, ever professed a deep and unsullied affection for the USGS topographical sheets that it is possible to order from the government agencies. They are fine enough maps, and they cover the entirety of the nation. But seldom are they bought for the sheer pleasure of ownership, of the ability to pore over them and imagine, or remember, to draw contented admiration at their elegant appearance and scrupulous accuracy.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“elision – that ‘Akira was a lifelong”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

“Through the early part of the eighteenth century, this unease showing itself was born from more than just the simple freelance acts of enclosure that so troubled the peasantry of the day: rather there was a distinct feeling of an inchoate unease, a gathering impression that the country had become awash in newfangled ideas, part of what we now know to have been the beginning of the Enlightenment. There were new and unsettling developments in farming techniques, the introduction of machinery and of four-crop rotation methods, which we in retrospect now recognize as the Agricultural Revolution. There were hints of the coming of the Industrial Revolution too, a revolution that would soon sweep like a gale through all of English society and would massively enhance the rise and role of cities, which would lure workers in vast numbers away from the countryside. The unease of the times parallels to a degree the same kind of bewilderment at the rate of change in society that so clearly afflicts twenty-first-century humankind.”
― Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World