Human Geography Quotes

Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where people dwell in greatest numbers.

Without geography you're nowhere.

The study of geography is about more than just memorizing places on a map. It's about understanding the complexity of our world, appreciating the diversity of cultures that exists across continents. And in the end, it's about using all that knowledge to help bridge divides and bring people together.

There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.

Geography determines social development …. But geography may be losing much of its meaning.

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.

History is not everything, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.

Geography was the lesson I always looked forward to most. It was a form of escapism. It could be bleak midwinter outside but inside you're learning about African farming methods or the Great Lakes. No other lesson had that excitement.

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

I would say that the fundamental question of geography is about how humans shaped the Earth's surface and how we, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which we have shaped the Earth's surface. So, for me, geography was just a set of tools that allowed me to ask these kinds of questions and to try to think through them.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Populations factors are indeed critical in and often determine and solve violent conflict in developing areas. Religious, social and racial differences, migration, rapid population growth, differential levels of knowledge and skills, rural/urban differences, population pressure and the spatial location of population in relation to resources, in this rough order of importance, all appear to be important contributions to conflict and violence …. Clearly conflicts which are regarded in primarily political terms often have demographic roots …. Where population size is greater than available resources, or is expanding more rapidly than the available resources, there is a tendency toward internal disorders and violence and, sometimes, disruptive international policies or violence.... In developing countries, the burden of population factors, added to others, will weaken unstable governments, often only marginally effective in good times, and open the way to extremist regimes

While massive datasets may feel very abstract, they are intricately linked to physical place and human culture. And places, like people, have their own individual character and grain.

My undergraduate degree is in geography and sociology, so I had like no real training with words.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

I try to understand place on a deeper level than just the physical or environmental aspects. It includes cultural and intellectual forces, too. It's an inclusive approach that brings in many disciplines and sees place as a dynamic thing.

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

In human geography, we think about landscapes as being political, social, cultural, economic, and physical things all at the same time. And that's the way that I wanted to approach the question of state secrecy.

Mathematics was hard, dull work, I thought; geography pleased me more. For my other studies, as well as for dancing, I was quite enthusiastic.

GEOGRAPHER, n. A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the outside of the world and the inside.