Prehistory Quotes

• South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

  Louis Leakey

  Long, Records, Lasts

  55 Copy quote

• Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

  Jean M. Auel

  Journey, Space, Ships

  53 Copy quote

• In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory -- horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene -- and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Horse, Shoes, Space

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

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• When I look at history, I am a pessimist...but when I look at prehistory, I am an optimist.

  Jan Smuts

  Looks, Pessimist, Optimist

  18 Copy quote

• Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

  Clarice Lispector

  Life, Saying Yes, Novelists

  Clarice Lispector (1986). “The Hour of the Star”, p.11, New Directions Publishing

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• Perhaps we become aware of our existence only when we feel on our skin the touch of a place that has no name, that connects us to the earliest time, to all the dead, to prehistory, when the mind first stood apart from the world, still unaware that it was orphaned.

  Andrzej Stasiuk

  Names, Mind, Skins

  Andrzej Stasiuk, Petra Hardt (2011). “On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea of what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge. Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Children, Order, Ideas

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Long Live Hitch: Three Classic Books in One Volume”, p.67, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

  H. G. Wells

  Age, Humans, Human Beings

  9 Copy quote

• Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.

  Alice Miller

  Children, Long, Childhood

  Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.265, Macmillan

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• One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Ideas, Infancy Is, Matter

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.49, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The trip I made to Angola to study the prehistoric contents of the gravel beds as a means of deciding the age of the deposits and their economic potential was the first time prehistory had ever been used for such a purpose.

  Louis Leakey

  Mean, Age, Bed

  91 Copy quote

• We are nothing: imitations, copies, phantoms: repeaters of what we understand badly, that is, hardly at all: the animated fossils of a prehistory that have lived neither here nor there, consequently anywhere, for we are aboriginal foreigners, transplanted from birth in our respective countries of origin.

  Enrique Lihn

  Country, Fossils, Phantoms

  4 Copy quote

• Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure - having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory - we can't see the Indian among us.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Movement, Kind, Mascots

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Approaches to death and dying reveal much of the attitude of society as a whole to the individuals who compose it. The development of ideas of what constitutes a good death can even be traced to prehistory.

  Cicely Saunders

  Attitude, Ideas, Dying

  Foreword in The Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1993)

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• The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Mind, History Of Life, Development

  4 Copy quote

• War was ... the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.

  Barbara Holland

  Morning, War, Politician

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

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• I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.

  Alice Walker

  Daughter, Mother, Teaching

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• War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.

  Gwynne Dyer

  War, Years, Innovation

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• Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.

  Sigfried Giedion

  Art, Reality, Views

  Sigfried Giedion (1962). “The Eternal Present: The beginnings of art”, [New York

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• The truth is, "What is a journalist?" is one of those questions for which there is no proper answer. The prehistory of modern journalism shows it has been a ragged and confusing trade all the way through.

  Andrew Marr

  Modern Journalism, Confusing, Way

  7 Copy quote

• These are the experiences I wish to record in this book, which should really be called The Diary of a Palaeontologist. But in committing them to paper I found it advisable to alter and add a good deal, to enable the reader without specialized training to follow me along the winding paths of palaeontology and prehistory.

  Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

  Book, Training, Wish

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• The earliest religious texts in the West ascribe to humankind both a prehistory and a destiny among the gods. M. David Litwa presents a striking survey of the varieties the latter of these beliefs has had, both within and outside the Christian tradition. Becoming Divine reconstructs an accessible and fascinating mosaic of this too-long neglected idea, utilizing figures as disparate as Orphic cultists, Augustine, and Nietzsche.

  Terryl L. Givens

  Christian, Religious, Destiny

  4 Copy quote

• The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man.

  Weston La Barre

  Men, Stories, Quests

  4 Copy quote

• All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
  Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

  Clarice Lispector

  Mistake, Simplicity, Effort

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