Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.
If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.
There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.
But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.
The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history - no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed.
The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.
I was a daydreamer, and there is a lot of history and geography and science I missed out on because I was in my head. And I regret that.
The history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the creator was not thinking about what he was working on, not consciously anyway - the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight.
I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.
There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.
If cleverness has often been a sign of decadence throughout history, the attempt to be too clever by half is an even more reliable marker of cultural decline.
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
I was born on December 30, 1930 in Ningbo, a city on the east coast of China with a rich culture and over seven thousand years of history. Although it was a tumultuous age in China when I was a child, I was lucky enough to have completed a good education from primary to middle school.
History will record that the Citizens United decision is one of the worst in the history of our country.
