Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

It takes a tribe to raise a human.

Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers.

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can't live without it.

The great success of the Arab imperial project was that the imperial culture it created was wholeheartedly adopted by numerous non-Arab people, who continued to uphold it, develop it and spread it - even after the original empire collapsed and the Arabs as an ethnic group lost their dominion.

The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don't take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape — and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.