"Money has been essential both for building empires and for promoting science. Neither modern armies nor university laboratories can be sustained without banks."

"[T]o understand modern economic history, you need to understand... a single word... growth."

"Smith's claim that the selfish human urge... is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary.., not just from an economic... but... more so from a moral and political perspective. ...Smith says.., greed is good, and... by becoming richer I benefit everybody... is altruism."

"Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of... resources... invested in production. Wealth... is buried... or wasted on unproductive activities."

"Napoleon... [called the British] a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon... and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen."

"In the late nineteenth century... [~]40 million Chinese, a tenth of the... population, were addicts."

"In the Middle Ages, was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly..."

"The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eight kilograms in the early nineteenth century."

"From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.., [~]10 million African slaves were imported to America. ...[~]70 per cent... worked on the s."

"Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed."

"For decades was much more expensive than gold. ...Napoleon III... commissioned cutlery... for... distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold..."

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

"Religious holidays... have become shopping festivals."

"Obesity is a double victory... [E]ating little... will lead to economic contraction... [E]at too much and... buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over."

"The capitalist and consumerist ethics are... a merger of commandments. The... rich... 'Invest!' The... rest... 'Buy!'"

"Our... green and blue planet is becoming... concrete and plastic..."

"The Industrial Revolution turned the time table and the assembly line into a template... [S]chools... adopted... timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. ...[I]n places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king."

"The first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830."

"In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time. rather than the local times of Liverpool. Manchester and Glasgow."

"Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles."

"Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying ecconimic and legal rights independently of their family and community."

"Consumerism and nationalism... make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community.., that we... have a common past.., interest and... future. This isn't a lie. It's imagination."

"If AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection, it needs rights, just like humans and animals."

"The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever."

"In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple... But suggests... the temple may have been built first..."

"The structures at are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by s."

"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."

"Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less would weaken their immune system, and permanent settlements would be hotbeds of infectious disease."

"Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and... enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially."

"[T]he new agricultural tasks demanded so much time... people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat field. ...[W]heat... domesticated us."

"Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain."

"According to... evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth."

"The Agricultural Revolution... enlarged the... total... food.., but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. ...[I]t translated into population explosion and pampered elites."

"Even today, with all our advanced technology, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants... our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called 'corn' in US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant and animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years."

"[H]umans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This.., they thought, would provide... more fruit, grain and meat. It was... the Agricultural Revolution."

"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."

"The Galápagos Islands... remained uninhabited by humans until the nine-teenth century.., preserving a unique menagerie..."

"The elephant bird and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1.500 years ago - precisely when the first humans set foot on the island."

"At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about one hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools."

"No other animal [Homo sapiens] had ever moved into such a huge variety of habitats so quickly."

"The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet."

"It's common... to explain... everything as the result of climate change, but... earth's climate... is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of... climate change. ...[O]ur planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming."

"The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn't just adapt. They transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition."

"The moment the hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that the Homo sapiens to the top rung in the food chain, and became the deadliest species ever in the 4-billion-year history of life on earth."

"The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or Apollo 11 expedition to the moon."

"Planet Earth was separated into several ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance."

"Theism (from 'theos', 'god' in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of of eternal entities called gods."

"Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them 'animist' is this common approach to the world and man's place in it."

"Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution."

"Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well."