I discovered the quotation below from John Green on the most recent Crash Course World History video.

Alfred Crosby is a historian who wrote about how European settlers thrived in Neo-European countries. I don’t know much about him. He seems to have added a lot of information about biology to his study of history.

I’m mostly interested in him because he appears to be a lovable curmudgeon. The quote below comes from Crosby’s book The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. It is during a discussion of the difficulties in determining the quality rather than the quantity of food people have eaten. But what the hell, he argues, quantity at least gives us some idea:

Normally, you have to turn to Schopenhauer for such a gay assessment of life.