New Quotations in English
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers.
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.
A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money. As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified. This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal-which, in turn, allows them to be transferable.
The criminalization of debt, then, was the criminalization of the very basis of human society.
In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time.
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the problem of how unrelated individuals are to live together without killing each other—by providing them with a bond not based on kinship. Second, it gives people a motive, other than genetic self-interest, for sacrificing their lives on behalf of others.
All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.
My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
History as well as life itself is complicated - neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
