Gwynne Dyer Quotes

#1. Take the year a country first reaches 50% literacy and add one or two generations to allow the idea to sink in and, democracy, more or less automatically, appears.

Gwynne Dyer

#2. What makes the Arabs suitable candidates for democracy is their heritage as human beings, not their specific cultural or historical antecedents.

Gwynne Dyer

#3. The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilisation will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply. Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be reasonable about it.

Gwynne Dyer

#4. War is part of our history, but it is not in at all the same sense part of our prehistory. It is one of the innovations that occurred between nine and eleven thousand years ago when the first civilized societies were coming into being. What has been invented can be changed; war is not in our genes.

Gwynne Dyer

#5. The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.

Gwynne Dyer

#6. As the most religious country of the 18 surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teen pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis.

Gwynne Dyer

#7. Never did anyone ever stay longer than ten years because the resistance grows fiercer as your presence grows longer [in Afghanistan]. I don't think we are going to be any exception. What made us exempt from history?

Gwynne Dyer

#8. The most basic change necessary to our collective survival is underway: the last redefinition of humanity - gradually extending from family to tribe to nation to the human race.

Gwynne Dyer

#9. It doesn't matter what we think we are there [in Afghanistan] for; it matters what they think. They think we are invaders.

Gwynne Dyer

#10. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no Islamic State now.

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#11. The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050.

Gwynne Dyer

#12. While the high-level climate talks pursue their stately progress towards some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there is an undercurrent of suppressed panic in the conversations. The tipping points seem to be racing towards us a lot faster than people thought.

Gwynne Dyer