Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.

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?

Making a dream into reality begins with what you have, not with what you are waiting on.

Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.

Be you. It's life's best offer to others.

I can give you two words, " I tell him. "The second is off. Can you guess the first?

I set free the phantoms of my imagination.

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.

I'm 100 percent impartial. I'm - my responsibility is to manage this primary nominating contest neutrally and fairly.

I needed a song and I need a place to kind of get it out. John Paul [White] was there for me as a friend, and I really appreciated that because I just needed a place to go.

I want to live in a world where 'normal' is an insult.

A quick comeback is usually meant as license to be mean.