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Religious holidays... have become shopping festivals.

Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more... as a... positive... It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves.., even kill themselves slowly by .

[F]or the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe.

[W]illingness to admit ignorance... made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than... previous tradition[s].

[W]hy study history? ...[It] is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history... to widen... horizons, to understand that our present... is... [not] inevitable, and that we... have many more possibilities before us...

The Scientific Revolution... has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery... was... that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable.

Money... is most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it.

Writing is born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.

Don't believe... that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record... for driving the most plant and animal species to... extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

Myths and fictions accustom... people... to think in certain ways, to believe in... certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. ...[T]hereby ...artificial instincts ...enable millions of strangers to cooperate ...This network of artificial instinct is ...'Culture'.