Paul

“The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“As religious issues came to dominate political ones, any negotiations with the enemies of one state looked more and more like heresy and treason. The questions which divided Catholics from Protestants had ceased to be negotiable. Consequently . . . diplomatic contacts diminished.”98 It would not be the last time ideological fervor would act as an accelerant to a military conflagration.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“A major reason wars declined in number was that the units that could fight each other declined in number. Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank from five hundred around the time of the Thirty Years’ War to fewer than thirty in the 1950s.99 Now, you might think that this makes the decline in the frequency of wars just an accounting trick. With the stroke of an eraser, diplomats remove a line on a map that separates warring parties and magically take their conflict out of the “interstate war” books and hide it in the “civil war” books. But in fact the reduction is real.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined