Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, population pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy. Book IV

“But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.” 1984

Nearly half of all New Guinea languages have fewer than 500 speakers. Guns, Germs And Steel