With the advent of farming, human horizons expanded.
The control of violence is the most important dilemma every society faces.
The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.
Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuit...
This tended to increase the size of societies because contests of violence more often than not were won by the larger group.
The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.
Topographic conditions were the foundation of Greek democracy, just as those of a different kind gave rise to the Oriental despotisms of Egypt and elsewhere.
To dare a thought is to risk being wrong.
The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws.
Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.
You cannot friend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why.
The growing importance of technology and manufactured output reduced the impact of the weather on economic cycles.
Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must stain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence.
Incomes will become more unequal within jurisdictions and more equal between them.
The idea of property emerged as an inevitable consequence of farming.
Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think about how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place.
Before the discovery of quinine in the mid-nineteenth century, white armies could not survive in malarial regions, however superior their weapons might have been.
A great part of the cultural energy of poor farming societies has always been devoted to suppressing experimentation. If they had insurance, or sufficient savings to self-insure their experiments, suc...
Wherever farming took root, violence emerged as a more important feature of social life.
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