Цитаты из книг — Ronald Wright

The Old Stone Age now seems so remote that we seldom give it a thought, (...) Yet it ended so recently — only six times further back than the birth of Christ and the Roman Empire — that the big changes since we left the cave have all been cultural, not physical. A long-lived species like ours can’t evolve significantly…

When Cortés landed in Mexico he found roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, peasants, artisans, armies, astronomers, merchants, sports, theatre, art, music, and books. High civilization, differing in detail but alike in essentials, had evolved…

When Mahatma Gandhi came to England in the 1930s for talks on Indian self-rule, a reporter asked him what he thought of Western civilization. Gandhi, who had just visited the London slums, replied: “I think it would be a very good idea."

The Roman circus, the Aztec sacrifices, the Inquisition bonfires, the Nazi death camps — all have been the work of highly civilized societies.

Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 — by driving a whole herd over a cliff — had made too much. They lived high for a while, then starved.

(...) imperial expansion of the United States across her continent in the nineteenth century. American national mythology sees this as “pioneering” and “settlement,” but the conquest and dispossession of one Indian people after another, including organized native states such as the Cherokee and Iroquois, was clearly…

The studies also show that the earth’s climate has sometimes fluctuated wildly, breaking from an ice age — or plunging into one — not over centuries but in decades.

Someone fond of logical absurdities once defined specialists as “people who know more and more about less and less, until they know all about nothing."

Nowadays we have reached such a pass that the skills and mores we learn in childhood are outdated by the time we’re thirty, and few people past fifty can keep up with their culture — whether in idiom, attitudes, taste, or technology — even if they try. But I am getting ahead in the story. Most people living in the Old…

The exact number of bison killed is unknown. Estimates range between 30 million and 60 million. In the 1870s, more than a million a year were being killed by white hunters; by the century’s end, only a few hundred animals were left.