Having taken around 200,000 years to get to the halfway mark, demographers reckon that three-quarters of humanity could be city-dwelling by 2050, with most of the increase coming in the fast-growing towns of Asia and Africa.
The type of war that Europe had allowed itself to wage against three-quarters of humanity – was that what came back to haunt us in the 20th century?" The fractured structure of that book – Lindqvist suggests multiple entry paths through its numbered paragraphs, breaking each journey through the text into fragments – is emblematic of the disruption caused by the aerial bomb.
Founding the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao exulted, "The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have stood up".
China, with one-fifth of the world's population, is now on track to represent more than a quarter of humanity's energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions.
How people judge their own well-beingONLY around a quarter of humanity feel they are "thriving" along numerous social and financial dimensions.
Among peasant families in north-eastern China in the century after 1774, between one-fifth and one-quarter of all females were killed as children, says Mr Lee in a forthcoming book, "One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Reality 1700-2000" (Harvard University Press, 1999), written with Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine.
A recent UN report suggested that by 2050, three-quarters of humanity will live in our swelling cities.
They provide water for a quarter of humanity.
When the Chinese Communist party took power in 1949, Mao Zedong declared to a party conference, "The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up.
By virtue of being white instead of black, and male instead of female, you've got higher status than roughly three-quarters of the humanity around you.
How could anyone, cut off from the rest of humanity for more that a quarter of a century, be anything but unworldly, particularly in the handling of money?
