A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

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.

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

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

Before you examine the body of a patient, be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, you will also come to know his body.

No sane person resists the smell of the soil when sprinkled with water, Especially the smell of the intercourse between earth and rain.

Fashion, for me, is anything that's aesthetic and beautiful. Art, food, film. It's something that I appreciate and really like.

The greater and more persistent your confidence in God, the more abundantly you will receive all that you ask.

[Instead] of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.

Only God knows how much I love you.

Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.

He who knows others is clever; He who knows himself has discernment.

I'm personally opposed to a deep tan because I like to feel blond all over.

Efforts to ease regulations and reform the nation's tax system have helped put this self-sustaining recovery on track, The numbers prove our policies have not been wrong.