History is not the accumulation of events of every kind…

Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.

— Susan Sontag

History is an accumulation of error.

— Norman Cousins

“Personal and world history is an accumulation of todays, and how they were spent.”

— Andrew M. Davis

The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number…

— Arthur C. Clarke

The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural.

— Ruth Benedict

We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human…

— Noam Chomsky

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one…

— Claude Levi-Strauss

Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are…

— Alexis De Tocqueville

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

— Emile Durkheim

The most threatened group in human societies as in animal societies is the unmated male: the unmated male is more likely to wind up…

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is,…

— James Howard Kunstler

Its likely that a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blindered, rather than more focused on the crisis,…

— Ed Ayres

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately…

— Vaclav Smil

Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of…

— William E. Rees

History has been conceived--and with high justification in the records--as the human struggle for civilization against barbarism in different ages and places, from the…

— Mary Ritter Beard