David Christian History Quotations

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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