David Christian Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You go to the cosmologists and ask how they tell the history of the universe; you go to the geologists, how do they tell the story of the earth, and the biologists, and then you string them together. And it turns out that when you string them together, if you do it carefully, there's a story that is coherent, engaging, fantastically interesting.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.”

“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.”

“What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.”

“Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.”