Charles C. Mann > Quotes

“It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.”
― Charles C. Mann

“In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“I kept waiting for the book to appear. The wait grew more frustrating when my son entered school and was taught the same things I had been taught, beliefs I knew had long been sharply questioned. Since nobody else appeared to be writing the book, I finally decided to try it myself. Besides, I was curious to learn more. The book you are holding is the result.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“mistaken. The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón’s voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike. In this sense the world has become one, exactly as the old admiral hoped. The lighthouse in Santo Domingo should be regarded less as a celebration of the man who began it than a recognition of the world he almost accidentally created, the world of the Homogenocene we live in today.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“As it does today, malaria played a huge role in the past—a role unlike that of other diseases, and arguably larger. When Europeans brought smallpox and influenza to the Americas, they set off epidemics: sudden outbursts that shot through Indian towns and villages, then faded. Malaria, by contrast, became endemic, an ever-present, debilitating presence in the landscape. Socially speaking, malaria—along with another mosquito-borne disease, yellow fever—turned the Americas upside down. Before these maladies arrived, the most thickly inhabited terrain north of Mexico was what is now the southeastern United States, and the wet forests of Mesoamerica and Amazonia held millions of people. After malaria and yellow fever, these previously salubrious areas became inhospitable. Their former inhabitants fled to safer lands; Europeans who moved into the emptied real estate often did not survive a year.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“Pilgrim writers universally reported that Wampanoag families were close and loving—more so than English families, some thought. Europeans in those days tended to view children as moving straight from infancy to adulthood around the age of seven, and often thereupon sent them out to work. Indian parents, by contrast, regarded the years before puberty as a time of playful development, and kept their offspring close by until marriage. (Jarringly, to the present-day eye, some Pilgrims interpreted this as sparing the rod.) Boys”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed.”
― Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

“A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth's population find screamingly dull.”
― Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

“responses to my questions fell into two broad categories, each associated (at least in my mind) with one of two people, Americans who lived in the twentieth century.”
― Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

“Dobyns argued that the Indian population in 1491 was between 90 and 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that when Columbus sailed more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection.”
― Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

“He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love,” Wood explained. Character”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan’s fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Puebla shopkeepers complained that the country was fighting an invasion of counterfeits from China—a Chinese imitation of a Chinese-made Mexican imitation of a Chinese original.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth

“food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half—since the days of Pithole—about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.”
― Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World