One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country.

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?

In a world full of game players, the only way to set yourself apart is to be a game changer.

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. ("Dusk To Dawn")

every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing

It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.

Things looked funny because my pictures depend on an emotional state... I know this is true and I thought about this for a long time. Somehow it made me feel very, very good.

There is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.

Pay-TV companies that built their businesses on the backs of local and network broadcast signals should pay a fair price for access to that high-value programming.

My heart is, and always will be, yours.

I'm going to give people the benefit of the doubt.

The comfort of our peer-connections is reflected in our most honest and direct hand-holding. When we trip, they are the first ones to pull us back up.