Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.

The first step towards attaining a higher standard of holiness is to realize more fully the amazing sinfulness of sin.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.

As we say in the hood, I'm a stoop kid.

Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.

And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.

I couldn't see what was real until time had washed away everything else.