The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today. Some of Britain's biggest landowners are still direct descendants of Norman barons. And given the impact that Britain has had on the world over the past few hundred years, you could perhaps say this was a global issue. History is always with us.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.