Human History Quotes

“Eliza answered, “My Lady, that was Sir Roger Mortimer!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“McGregor went on to say, “Hamish, take word of this situation directly to Robert de Bruce, who is currently in the Glasgow area. Let him know that the Sassenach queen is at Tynemouth Priory and that we are going to capture her! She will fetch us a high ransom price from the Sassenach king!”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“Cynthia said, “How are things going for you with this birth?”
― Michael G. Kramer, Isabella Warrior Queen

“As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“Secrets,’ she replied, casting my trousers aside, ‘are difficult things. Not precise. Not always the same for the one who tells as for the one who receives. They make demands. They may cause you to ask yourself, “Am I worthy?”’ At which, as if to illustrate the point, she removed her bra and watched me follow the lines of her magnificent form with my eyes.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Ranjana finds Stephen lying on an old string bed staring up at the ceiling and seeing in its myriad cracks the soothing drift of clouds. She puts what she’s brought to his lips, brushes them with her fingertips, and watches as he works the sweet onto his teeth. She feels a light touch on her arm encouraging her to lie next to him. She rests on her back, the pair of them laid out like two corpses waiting for the first shower of moist earth. After a while, she rolls over, nuzzles into his shoulder, and lets her hand fall limp and sweet across his chest. She drifts off to sleep, sweating in the arms of her lover.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“When the bell of my flat rings at four o’clock in the afternoon, I don’t expect a policeman to be standing outside. “Sorry to disturb you sir,” he says. “Detective sergeant McCorquodale. It’s about your mother.” Detective sergeant McCorquodale is an enormous lighthouse of a man with the untroubled skin of a baby and not a trace of facial hair; a sort of man-boy who’s overdosed on growth hormones.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“He was shy in her presence the next morning, his brittle spirit quenched enough not to shatter. The children did not see the ghost she saw, only his longed-for presence.”
― Leslie K. Simmons, Red Clay, Running Waters

“Are you saying these Christians believe we will never be good enough to marry their daughters because of our race?”
― Leslie K. Simmons, Red Clay, Running Waters

“I sometimes think with Moliere, Mr. Ridge, that ‘there is no folly equal to he who attempts to mend the world.’”
A single, unsuppressed laugh escaped him. “Yes,” he reluctantly replied, “but I cannot but help to attempt it, nonetheless.”
― Leslie K. Simmons, Red Clay, Running Waters

“The absolute truth is the biggest myth in human history.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Checking a box on a form for race—"Caucasian," "Hispanic," "African-American," "Native American," or "Asian-American"—is untenable and ridiculous. For one thing, "American" is not a race, so labels such as "Asian-American" and "African-American" are still exhibits of our confusion of culture and race. For another thing, how far back does one go in history? Native Americans are really Asians, if you go back more than twenty or thirty thousand years to before they crossed the Bering land bridge between Asia and America. And Asians, several hundred thousand years ago probably came out of Africa, so we should really replace "Native American" with "African-Asian-Native American." Finally, if the Out of Africa (single racial origin) theory holds true, then all modern humans are from Africa. (Cavalli-Sforza now thinks this may have been as recently as seventy thousand years ago.) Even if that theory gives way to the Candelabra (multiple racial origins) theory, ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to "African-American.”
― Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

“If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

“It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“History is everything that's already happened, right up to the moment you read these words. That's a lot to tackle for one museum, but not to worry, there are hundreds.”
― Mackenzie Finklea, Beyond the Halls: An Insider's Guide to Loving Museums

“Human history unfolds catastrophically, in a ceaselessly reiterated overturning of origin and end driven by the twin pulses of libidinal repetition and social reproduction.”
― Ray Brassier

“In her hands, a corpse is like one of those old Bibles chained up in a dusty room, not only the printed text and the rich colours of the pictures, but the records of marriages and births and deaths in the back pages, the history of a town. It's a shame we don't think of ourselves that way more often.”
― Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir

“इंसानी इतिहास बताता है कि कुत्ते के साथ स्वामिभक्ति जुड़ी हुई है।”
― Vandana Yadav, आई डोन्ट लाइक यू

“This planet has never been the home of the human race, it has always been the home of the rich and privileged, while the rest of humanity slave their butt off, barely scraping by on hand-me-downs and leftovers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability

“The current coronavirus pandemic is a (relatively mild) reminder of the decisive role that plagues played in human history.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Yesterday is today and today is tomorrow everything that happened in the past leads us to today.”
― haytham hossam, Humans

“When I thought of my ancestors, if I thoughts of them at all, as some sort of vague and amorphous collection of dead people with no solid connection to me or the modern world and certainty no real relevance to either. It was interesting enough to read about the Cro Magnons got up to all those years ago but nothing much to do with me. But once I had realised through genetics that one of my ancestors was actually there taking part is was no longer merely interesting it is overwhelming. DNA is the messenger to luminate that connection, handed down generation to generation, carried, literally, in the bodies of my ancestors. Each message traces a journey through time and space, a journey made by the long lines that springs from the ancestral mothers. We will never know all the details of these journeys over thousands of years and thousands of miles, but we can at least imagine them. I am on a stage. Before me, in the dim light are all who have ever lives are lined up - rank upon rank, stretching far into the distance. They make no sound that I can hear but they are talking to each other. I have in my hand the end of a thread which connects me to my ancestral mother, way at the back. I pull on the thread and one woman's face in every generation, feeling the tug, looks up at me. Their faces stand out from the crowd and they are illuminated by a strange light. These are my ancestors. I recognise my grandmother in the front row, but the faces in the generations behind her are unfamiliar to me. I look down the line. The women do not all look the same. Some are tall, some are short, some are beautiful, some are plain, some look wealthy, others poor. I want to ask them each in turn about their lives, their hopes, their disappointments, their joys and their sacrifices. I speak but they cannot hear. I feel a strong connection. These are all my mothers who passed this precious message from one to another through a thousand births, a thousand screams, a thousand embraces, a thousand new born babies. The thread becomes an umbilical cord. A thousand rows back stands Tara herself, the ancestral mother of my clan. She pulls on the cord. In the great throng, a million ancestors feel the tug in lines that radiate out from her source.”
― Brian Sykes, The Daughters of Eve

“If we truly leave Christianity behind, we must give up the idea that human history has a meaning.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“Do you know what surprised me most when I came to this country? The way witches are glorified. People here dress up as us for Halloween. They fill their TV shows and social media profiles with our aesthetics. It's like they've forgotten that, for most of human history, witches were something to mutilate, not emulate. Women who were seen as outcasts—too queer, too brown, too unwell...Any one of us on the margins was a target. To me, a pointy hat and a broomstick are not a cute costume; they are a reminder that, for centuries, people were brutalized under the mere assumption they might be what we actually are.”
― Roseanne A. Brown, Serwa Boateng's Guide to Witchcraft and Mayhem

“The unequivocal truths of human existence lies in the behavioral patterns entrenched in history.”
― Zephyr McIntyre

“We are designed to survive through collaboration with a mindset that speaks to the choir of we, so begin by being open to others with integrity.”
― Zephyr A McIntyre

“Every human is an African diaspora.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Nazmahal: Palace of Grace

“Four key factors led to the global conquest of the world by Goliaths: large populations, better military technology, pandemics, and an eagerness to exploit people and places. In other words: babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism.”
― Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse

“Despite the fantasies of some wealthy survivalists, who hope to ride out the apocalypse in well-stocked bunkers, worldwide ecological degradation makes it clearer than ever that human and nonhuman destinies are inextricably tied to each other in a biosphere that encompasses us all.”
― David R. Loy, Loving the World as Our Body: The Nondual Path in a Dangerous Time

“Humanity is a young child. We visit ancient ruins in Athens and study medieval kingdoms that make us feel like our species is old. But the industrial world has existed for barely 250 years. Organized civilization has been around for 10,000. And inside the last 2% of our timeline, we were still arguing about whether a human being could be allowed to live their own life or owned. We are inexperienced. And terrible things happen to people when life is treated as an unquestioned inevitability. There is no reason to believe we have suddenly reached the final version of society. It’s arrogant. We are far from perfect and are more prototype than product.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human