Charles C. Mann Quotes & Sayings

Holmberg's Mistake. — Charles C. Mann

Rare is the human spirit that remains buoyant in a holocaust. — Charles C. Mann

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent. — Charles C. Mann

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit. — Charles C. Mann

He that speaks seldom and opportunely, being as good as his word, is the only man they love," Wood explained. Character — Charles C. Mann

Inexperienced in agriculture, the Pilgrims were also not woodspeople; indeed, they were so incurious about their environment that Bradford felt obliged to comment in his journal when Francis Billington . . . climbed to the top of a tall tree to look around. As Thoreau noted with disgust, the colonists landed at Plymouth on December 16, but it was not until January 8 that one of them went as far away as two miles--and even then the traveler was, again, Francis Billington. — Charles C. Mann

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now. — Charles C. Mann

Our visit to Calakmul did nothing to suggest that Folan's advice was wrong. Trees enveloped the great buildings, their roots slowly ripping apart the soft limestone walls. Peter photographed a monument with roots coiled around it, boa constrictor style, five or six feet high. So overwhelming was the tropical forest that I thought Calakmul's history would remain forever unknown. — Charles C. Mann

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief
S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages. — Charles C. Mann

Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely. — Charles C. Mann

The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end. — Charles C. Mann

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past. — Charles C. Mann

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood - to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today's modern, globalized megalopolises. — Charles C. Mann

Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after. — Charles C. Mann

The chronological list of rulers differs on different lists, some lists do not include known kings, and some include kings who probably were mythological - as if a tally of English rulers matter-of-factly included King Arthur and his father, Uther Pendragon. The — Charles C. Mann

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude - as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. — Charles C. Mann

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth. — Charles C. Mann

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests. — Charles C. Mann

Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. — Charles C. Mann

Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich'aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended to his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But — Charles C. Mann

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors. — Charles C. Mann

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter. — Charles C. Mann

The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa. — Charles C. Mann

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road. — Charles C. Mann

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names. — Charles C. Mann

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering. — Charles C. Mann

By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern — Charles C. Mann

of venereal soldiers along the way. A more effective — Charles C. Mann

[T]he Indian deaths were such a severe financial blow to the colonies that...[t]o resupply themselves with labor, the Spaniards began importing slaves from Africa. — Charles C. Mann

How could the colonists starve in the midst of plenty? One reason was that the English feared leaving Jamestown to fish, because Powhatan's fighters were waiting outside the colony walls. A second reason was that a startlingly large proportion of the colonists were gentlemen, a status defined by not having to perform manual labor. — Charles C. Mann