I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

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?

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.

You have so much love in you. Trust your firends and family. They're all you have, but they're precious, the most important part of your life.

And the cavern of fire was enormous, labyrinthine, that received the man. He branched and flamed, glowed and increased, and was suddenly extinguished in the little puffs of smoke and tired thoughts.

Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.

I've learned sometimes you just have to take the bad from people.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes any sacrifice, and everything else seems without value to her

That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy

Everyone believes that he abounds in wisdom, but is short of money.

Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say