Human History Quotes

Now, I believe that war is never inevitable until it starts, but there has been a great proclivity in human history, and including in recent history, for war.

The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.

Since periods of great change, such as the present one, come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

The one thing that flies in the face of all human history and experience, is that the government can do a superior job than the private sector.

If you look throughout human history ... the central epiphany of every religious tradition always occurs in the wilderness.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.

There is no time in human history when you were more perfectly represented than in the Garden of Eden.

Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.

We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Knowing how to deal with change effectively is a primary requirement for living successfully in perhaps the most exciting time in all of human history

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

A lot is said, by foreigners and the left, about America being a violent society. Yet if you subtract the crime statistics for its largest cities places that have been under the strict political control of so-called "progressives", sometimes for many generations what remains, the real America, is the most peaceful, productive, prosperous, and truly progressive civilization in all of human history.

Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history. ... Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.

One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man...It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.

The 'coming of the Self' is immanent; and the process of collective 'individuation' is living itself out in human history. One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But it will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness. If a sufficient number of individuals can have the experience of the coming of the Self as an individual, inner experience, we may just possibly be spared the worst features of its external manifestation.

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc.

Technology is closing the gap between what one can imagine and what one can do and as a result the equality of opportunity is unmatched in human history.

As a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation's resources over a long period of time to make that right.

Men have said that the cross of Christ was not a heroic thing, but I want to tell you that the cross of Jesus Christ has put more heroism in the souls of men than any other event in human history.

One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].

The dignity of the human person is a transcendent value, always recognized as such by those who sincerely search for the truth. Indeed, the whole of human history should be interpreted in the light of this certainty. Every person, created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gn 1:26 28), is therefore radically oriented towards the Creator, and is constantly in relationship with those possessed of the same dignity. To promote the good of the individual is thus to serve the common good, which is that point where rights and duties converge and reinforce one another.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

Capitalism has been one of the most dynamic forces in human history, transforming one society after another, and today it has become established as an international system determining the economic fate of most of mankind.

The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.

The bleak truth is that, under normal conditions, most of North America and Europe are buried under about 1.5km of ice. This bitterly frigid climate is interrupted occasionally by brief warm interglacials, typically lasting less than 10,000 years. The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue, Chapman wrote. All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.

The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. The mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems.

To take wine into your mouth is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

For most of human history, we could only watch, like bystanders, the beautiful dance of Nature. But today, we are on the cusp of an epoch-making transition, from being passive observers of Nature to being active choreographers of Nature. The Age of Discovery in science is coming to a close, opening up an Age of Mastery.

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.

The apologists for space science always seem over-impressed by engineering trivia and make far too much of non-stick frying pans and perfect ball-bearings. To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and answers.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?

The uniqueness of the United States in human history is the United States is the first global power in human history which emerged far away from Africa or Asia, which is the main land of human history.

How are we going to make our livings in a society becoming increasingly jobless because of hi-tech and outsourcing? Where will we get the imagination to recognize that for most of human history the concept of Jobs didn't even exist? Work, as distinguished from Labor, was done to produce needed goods and services, develop skills and artistry, and nurture cooperation.

[I want to build] the biggest apparel company in human history.

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

The adjective 'decent' and the noun 'government' have seldom come together in the human history!

Let us not forget that the value of this great system does not lie primarily in its extent or even in its efficiency. Its worth depends on the use that is made of it... For the first time in human history we have available to us the ability to communicate simultaneously with millions of our fellowmen, to furnish entertainment, instruction, widening vision of national problems and national events. An obligation rests on us to see that it is devoted to real service and to develop the material that is transmitted into that which is really worthwhile.

But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.

Capitalism in the 19th century did not doom the worker to a life of perpetual poverty. Instead, they kept creating new and better-paying employments as the decades went by. They produced the wealth and rising income that resulted in the emergence of a phenomenon completely new to human history: a self-supporting and educated middle class that grew more and more as they lower classes bettered their economic well-being.

Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males.