William Hardy McNeill - History Quotes

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Ssu-ma Ch'ien's many-volumed history of China established the frame within which Chinese history continued to be written almost to the present day. Ssu-ma Ch'ien accepted and made canonical the theory that each dynasty began with an especially virtuous ruler and then gradually dissipated that virtue until Heaven lost patience and substituted a new dynasty in its place.

William Hardy McNeill
Inferences and large dosages of imagination actually have allowed the construction of a far more adequate understanding of the cosmic and human past than earlier generations achieved. I believe that this is the central intellectual accomplishment of the twentieth century. Innumerable cosmologists, physicists, mathematicians, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, ecologists, ethologists, and other specialists have played their part; a few swashbuckling intellects led the way, and the outlines of an evolutionary worldview, uniting natural and human history, has begun to emerge. It may be convincing for generations to come—or again may not.

William Hardy McNeill
Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A. D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A. D. This obviously parallels the successes that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period.

William Hardy McNeill
Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.

William Hardy McNeill
The rise of Islam offers perhaps the most impressive example in world history of the power of words to alter human behavior in sudden, surprising ways.

William Hardy McNeill