“[Capitalist–consumerism] is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do... most people today successfully live up to this ideal... the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“'Arms racing' is a patterns of behavior that spreads itself like a virus from one country to another, harming everyone.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering... This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is... happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed... Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, that happiness results from processes occurring withing one's body, not from events in the outside world... the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of money, goods, and resources that are invested in production. Wealth on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely... Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Consumerism encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product... Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Every new invention just puts another mile between us and the Garden of Eden.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Every point in history is a crossroads. A single traveled road leads from the past to the present, but myriad paths fork off into the future.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Huxley's vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell's 1984. Huxley's world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time — what could be wrong with that.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids... Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

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

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists... Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition. It worked... Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Only 40 years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy—that's what E=mc2 means—and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries [science undermining beliefs in an indivisible, immutable self] under the carpet. But how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable... Yet over the last 200 years, the life science have thoroughly undermined this belief.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community. Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbors’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism... [it] tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can... go traveling in distant lands, sample various kinds of relationships, try different cuisines, different styles of music”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“St. Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to god... [ proving ] only that humankind is sinful by nature and easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The Agricultural Revolution was a trap... This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans... the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way... Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The British killed, injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent, but they also united a bewildering mosaic of warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a shared national consciousness... the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching... the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman... The fundamental insight of polytheism is that the supreme power governing the world is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares, and worries of humans.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organizational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth... I can become wealthy without you becoming poor; I can be obese without you dying of hunger.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent... More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority... global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states... wouldn't it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The monotheistic religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions—and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will forever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do no really know what to make of it.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“the real question facing us is not, 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The romantic contrast between modern industry that 'destroys nature' and our ancestors who 'lived in harmony with nature' is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The transition from many small cultures to a few large cultures and finally to a single global society was probably an inevitable result of the dynamics of human history.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers, and managers... must ponder whether to answer the imperial call—with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states—or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power... Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“We are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other... a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“We have been disturbing the ecological equilibrium of our planet in myriad new ways... evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“What good was the French Revolution? If people did not become any happier, then what was the point of all that chaos, fear, blood, and war?... People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“When Alexander the Great once visited Diogenes as he was relaxing in the sun and asked if there were anything he might do for him, the Cynic answered the all-powerful conqueror, 'Yes, there is something you can do for me. Please move a little to the side. You are blocking the sunlight.'”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“When humans learned to farm in the Agricultural Revolution, their collective power to shape their environment increased, but the lot of many individual humans grew harsher. Peasants had to work harder than foragers to eke out less varied and nutritious food, and they were far more exposed to disease and exploitation”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment