We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

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?

But there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach.

...and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

If you want a sense of purpose for experiencing pressures, use your knowledge of Jesus Christ's comforting, enlivening, energizing presence to be a comfort to others.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

If a man talks bad about all women, it usually means he was burned by one woman.

Either black people end up being the best in sports, or else it's show business. You know, we all got rhythm.

The word impossible is peculiar because if you examine it closely, you'll find that most of it is possible.

It has been my exprience that repetitive nights of exposure to the kundalini energy followed by longer periods of reflection and pyschic networking create the fastest transitions in awareness.

But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.

Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.