Gerhard’s Reviews > The Years of Rice and Salt > Status Update

“Here are our conquerors, a culture where women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”

Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter.

One of the Japanese men snorted. “No one can take over the world,” he said. “It's too big.”

It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world.

...the Buddhist monasteries here were already centers of metalworking and mechanics, and ceramics. The local mathematicians brought calculation to full flower for use in navigation, gunnery, and mechanics.

History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another...

“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”

“Immoral?”
“Dancing and suchlike. Rhythmic motion during prayers—even the praying aloud.”
“It sounds fairly ordinary to me. Celebrations are celebrations, after all.”

“all the life stages”: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.