15 quotes
The principle obstacle to human dominion over the rain forests is still the rich variety of parasites lying in wait for intruders.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
The rise of Islam offers perhaps the most impressive example in world history of the power of words to alter human behavior in sudden, surprising ways.
Keeping Together in Time (1995)
Categories of understanding along with everything else alter as societies change.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
Social science is itself part of the social experience it seeks to interpret and explain.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
I do not insist that I am right: I merely think so.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
Predictive social science does not exist. Indeed, it seems to me that it cannot ever exist, since the behaviour to be predicted reacts to and is partly shaped by the words used by the predictors.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
Decisive breakthroughs in military medical administration came just after the turn of the twentieth century. Until then, in even the best-managed armies, disease was always a far more lethal factor than enemy action, even during active campaigns.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable, chronic relationship to establish itself.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
There was a Christian redaction of the historical vision of reality, associated especially with the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
When variations could be so extravagantly successful, displacement of one humanoid population by another even more effective group of hunters must have occurred frequently. Survival was more likely for the more formidable in battle as well as for the more efficient in the hunt.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
Positivism... may be regarded as a secularized form of the systematic theology which had been considered the crown of all the sciences in medieval European universities.
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)
Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
Painting responded to the plague-darkened vision of the human condition provoked by repeated exposure to sudden, inexplicable death. Tuscan painters reacted against Giotto's serenity, preferring sterner, hieratic portrayals of religious scenes and figures. The "Dance of Death" became a common theme for art; and several other macabre motifs entered the European repertory.
Plagues and Peoples (1976)
Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.
The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)
So far as I can see, coalescence of faith and truth has not been achieved anywhere in the world, not even in American departments of economics...
Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)