J.M. Roberts > Quotes

“What men do is shaped by what they believe they can do.”
― J.M. Roberts

“Europeans showed in 1900 much the same confidence in the continuing success of their culture as the Chinese elite had shown in theirs a century earlier. The past, they were sure, proved them right.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up.”
― J M Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New History of the World

“Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World

“Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986.” - written before 2003.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World

“For a quarter-century British governments had tried and failed to combine economic growth, increased social service provision and a high level of employment. The second depended ultimately on the first, but when difficulty arose, the first had always been sacrificed to the other two. The United Kingdom was, after all, a democracy whose votes, greedy and gullible, had to be placated.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New Penguin History of The World

“If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.”
― John Morris Roberts, The New History of the World

“It is important none the less that our remotest identifiable ancestors lived in trees because what survived in the next phase of evolution were genetic strains best suited to the special uncertainties and accidental challenges of the forest. That environment put a premium on the capacity to learn. Those survived whose genetic inheritance could respond and adapt to the surprising, sudden danger of deep shade, confused visual patterns and treacherous handholds. Strains prone to accident in such conditions were wiped out. Among those that prospered (genetically speaking) were some species with long digits which were to develop into fingers and, eventually, the oppositional thumb, and other forerunners of the apes already embarked upon an evolution towards three-dimensional vision and the diminution of the importance of the sense of smell.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Homo Sapiens”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“The Sumerian language lived on for centuries in temples and scribal schools, much as Latin lived on for the learned in the muddle of vernacular cultures in Europe after the collapse of the western classical world of Rome. The comparison is suggestive, because literary and linguistic tradition embodies ideas and images which impose, permit and limit different ways of seeing the world; they have, that is to say, historic weight.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“(history, it is often said, is not what it used to be).”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Lo que queda de esta primera época son objetos fabricados y utilizados por los pueblos que vivieron en los bordes de las zonas de inundación o en las escasas áreas rocosas del interior del valle o de sus flancos. Antes del 4000 a.C., estos habitantes empezaron a sentir el impacto de un importante cambio climático; se acumuló la arena procedente de los desiertos y se produjo la desecación.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“One clan, the Radziwiłłs, owned estates half the size of Ireland and held a court which outshone that of Warsaw; the Potocki estates covered 6,500 square miles (roughly half the area of the Dutch Republic).”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Once, most societies consisted mainly of peasants living in similar bondage to routine, custom, the seasons, poverty. Now, cultural gulfs within mankind – say, those between the European factory-worker and his equivalent in India or China – are often vast. That between the factory-worker and peasant is wider still. Yet even the peasant begins to sense the possibility of change. To have spread the idea that change is not only possible but also desirable is the most important and troublesome of all the results of European cultural influence.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“There is symbolism in the legend of the death of Archimedes during the fall of Syracuse, struck down while pondering geometrical problems in the sand, by the sword of a Roman soldier who did not know who he was.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“We can now see, for example, that more than any other single influence a growing abundance of commodities has recently shattered what was for millions – still not long ago – a world of stable expectations. This is still happening, most strikingly in some of the poorest countries. Cheap consumer goods and the images of them increasingly available in advertisements, especially on television, bring major social changes in their train. Such goods confer status; they generate envy and ambition, provide incentives to work for wages with which to buy them, and often encourage movement towards towns and centres where those wages are to be had. This severs ties with former ways and with the disciplines of ordered, stable life, and forms one of many currents feeding the hastening onrush of what is new.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“La cultura y la tradición están sustituyendo lentamente a la mutación genética y la selección natural como fuentes primarias del cambio entre los homínidos”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“Once, and not long ago, even the greatest of European monarchies could not carry out a census or create a unified internal market. Now, the state has a virtual monopoly of the main instruments of physical control. Even a hundred years ago, the police and armed forces of government unshaken by war or uncorrupted by sedition gave them a security; technology has only increased their near-certainty. New repressive techniques and weapons, though, are now only a small part of the story. State intervention in the economy through its power as consumer, investor or planner, and the improvement of mass communications in a form that leaves access to them highly centralized, all matter immensely. Hitler and Roosevelt made great use of radio (though for very different ends); and attempts to regulate economic life are as old as government itself.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“The Republic and its arguments were to provoke centuries of discussion and imitation”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“The achievement which made Greece the teacher of Europe (and through it of the world) is too rich and varied to generalize about even in long and close study; it is impossible to summarize in a page or so. But there is a salient theme which emerges in it: a growing confidence in rational”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“El sucesor del hombre de Neandertal y de las formas humanas arcaicas entre las que apareció este, fue el Homo sapiens sapiens, a la que pertenecemos. Su éxito biológico fue tan excepcional que se extendió por toda Eurasia en los cien mil años aproximados que siguieron a su primera aparición en África (datada hace unos 135.000 años) y, posteriormente, por todo el mundo.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“referidos a”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“Christianity’s greatest contribution to a later western civilization would be its stubbornly prophetic and individualistic assertion that life should be regulated with reference to a moral guidance independent not only of government but of any other merely human authority. It is not hard”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“The cost of the Great War has never been adequately computed though its scale is clear enough; over 10 million men died as a result of direct military. As for disease, typhus probably killed another million in the Balkans alone. Nor do even such terrible figures indicate the unprecedented physical and psychic toll in maiming, blinding, the loss to families of fathers, husbands and sons, the spiritual havoc in the destruction of ideals, confidence and goodwill. Europeans looked at their huge cemeteries and the long list of those who were, as the British memorials recorded, 'missing', and were appalled at what they had done.”
― J. M. Roberts, The History of the World

“Mientras al fondo rugen siglos de guerras incomprensibles (pero finalmente decisivas) en el Creciente Fértil, la historia del antiguo Egipto continúa durante miles de años, prácticamente como una función de las implacables y beneficiosas crecidas y retiradas de las aguas del Nilo. En sus riberas, un pueblo agradecido y pasivo recogía la riqueza que el río le regalaba, de la que podía apartar lo que estimaba necesario para la verdadera empresa de la vida: la preparación adecuada de la muerte.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“El proceso decisivo es la evolución de seres con apariencia humana como una rama diferenciada entre los primates, pues es en esta bifurcación de la línea, por decirlo así, donde comenzamos a estar atentos para encontrar la estación en la que descendemos para abordar la historia.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“El clima fue el primer gran regulador del cambio. Hace unos 40 millones de años —un momento suficientemente temprano para comenzar a afrontar nuestro relato—, una larga fase climática templada comenzó a llegar a su término.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“«Civilización» es el nombre que damos a una interacción muy creativa entre seres humanos cuando se ha llegado a una masa crítica de potencial cultural y a cierto excedente de recursos.”
― J.M. Roberts, Historia del mundo

“Both his conquests and their organization in empire bear the stamp of individual genius; the word is not too strong”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World