A Quote by Shimon Peres

Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.
A few years ago, they [Neandertals] were thought to be ancestral to anatomically modern humans, but now we know that modern humans appeared at least 100,000 years ago, much before the disappearance of the Neandertals. Moreover, in caves in the Middle East, fossils of modern humans have been found dated 120,000-100,000 years ago, as well as Neandertals dated at 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, followed again by modern humans dated at 40,000 years ago. It is unclear whether the two forms repeatedly replaced one another by migration from other regions, or whether they coexisted in some areas
Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different.
If U.S. focuses on truth and justice, we'll realize that Israel has been there for 3,000 years - the same language, the same people, the same culture for 3,000 years - and it's always astonishing to me that we somehow now think that they're the occupiers.
Fifteen years ago, nobody thought that content would ever work as a business. It was impossible to raise any money, initial investments were $10,000, seldom $100,000. It is only over the last two or three years that we have started to see very large amounts of capital coming into the digital industry. That has created a lot more competition.
The earth's history over the past several million years is that for every 100,000 years, we go through a dramatic climatic cycle where we get 90,000 years of ice age and 10,000 years of a warm period. I think people today just have the expectation that we deserve a perfectly benign climate forever.
I might be able to find out what happened 6,000 years ago but I will never know what happens 6,000 years in the future! And that is not fair, blast it.
I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.
The 21 Arab states that could easily have absorbed the original 650,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 refused to do so, even though their combined land mass was 700 times greater than that possessed by Israel. By contrast, the Jewish population of the new state was only 600,000, yet Israel willingly absorbed some 820,000 Jewish refugees from Europe.
I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.
Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store.
There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine ... been here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000. And we've only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat? The planet isn't going away. We are.
Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy. There's no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today and it was under the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin.
We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.
After 5,000 years of recorded human history, you wonder, what part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn't a pessimist understand?
I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago. First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old. And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old - beads. And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time.
At what point, 2,000 years on from the life of Jesus, do we need a refresher course? Another 2,000 years? Imagine 100,000 years’ time – would the story of Moses’ burning bush amaze a generation laden with unimaginable scientific and technological wonders? Here lies religion’s biggest quandary. While science is squeezing the life out of God, how is religion going to muster a counterattack from here?
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