The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

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?

Your assignment is a pre-cursor to someone else’s assignment. In the same breath, someone else’s assignment is a pre-cursor to yours.

After you are gone, people may forget most of what you have said and done. But they will remember that you loved them.

Arm yourself, my heart: the thing that you must do is fearful, yet inevitable.

A very excellent and worthy person, thoroughly reliable in every particular.

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

Leo couldnt deliver Mr. Martin Scorsese his Oscar with The Aviator, but I will go on record to say I will do so in The Departed.

When I die throw my body in the back and drive me to the junk yard in my Cadillac.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

But 'midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world's tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless.

If I did not love the things that I do, how could I spend my life doing this? You have to invest what you spend your life doing with pleasure.