Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by David Christian
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian David Christian.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.
If, in schools, we keep teaching that history is divided into American history and Chinese history and Russian history and Australian history, we're teaching kids that they are divided into tribes. And we're failing to teach them that we also, as human beings, share problems that we need to work together with.
In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.
Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.
I have this fantasy that in future negotiations over climate change - instead of going into that room and saying, 'I'm defending Chinese interests,' or 'I'm defending Australian interests' - there will also be an identity inside of each of the negotiators thinking, 'I'm also defending human interests.'
I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.
When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.
Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.
Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.
I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.
We inhabit an obscure planet, in an obscure galaxy, around an obscure sun, but on the other hand, modern human society represents one of the most complex things we know.
I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they're still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.
I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.
We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.
Big History's not going to replace existing educational courses. It's not an attack on specialisation. It is simply the argument that specialisation needs to be complemented with an overview, which I think is scientific commonsense.
If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.
Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.
Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.
Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff.
Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.
I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".
...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.
Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.
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