The crucial differences which distinguish human societies…

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

All known living bodies are sharply divided into two special kingdoms, based upon the essential differences which distinguish animals from plants, and in spite…

— Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.

— Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

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

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

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

In such systems, there is unquestioning respect for authority. Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour…

— Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

The problem is that those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to…

— Wade Davis