Geographical Determinism Quotes

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Sin is geographical.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

The fate of the Niger, of black and brown people … is being determined in a Hertfordshire beech avenue … where there hasn’t been the ghost of a palm for … 2 million years. I suppose it is all due in some way to the Glacial periods which make us what we are, able to lay down the law to the colored peoples who kept snug in the tropics while we were battling against the cold.

The policies of all powers are inherent in their geography.

It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples.

Those people who occupy a territory determine the nature of the society in that region.

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves

One cannot kick against geography!

Logic, having been invented by Greeks in the Northern hemisphere, does not apply south of the equator.