The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart dise...
What some men don't understand is that by opposing policies to reduce violence, promote equal pay and universal healthcare and voting to limit access to contraception and legal abortion, they are relegating women to another century, a time when men r...
I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 183...
Where they (modern books) are true they will give us truths we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep it clean seabreeze of the centuries flowing...
I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.
The first autonomous cars date back to the late 20th century. But recent increases in sophistication and reductions in cost - reflected, for example, in cheap LIDAR systems, which can 'see' a street in 3D in a way similar to that of the human eye - a...
It's interesting because with a lot of people who I've met in comedy, it seems not to matter what your background is. In terms of formal schooling - I feel like that's a nineteenth century term - but in terms of where you went to high school or colle...
I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was l...
For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to in...
Romney has adopted almost every position conservatives want their candidate to espouse: He's pro-life, he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he wants to cut taxes and cut the federal budget, and he wants an unapologetic foreign policy dedicated to the propos...
The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photogra...
One of the most important secret societies of the 20th century is called the Round Table. It is based in Britain with branches across the world. It is the Round Table that ultimately orchestrates the network of the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreig...
To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost ev...
That is very different from how it used to be in the 20th century. Media was very one way. There's a small little industry. It broadcasted its message and everyone else in the world just had to listen. Now the internet is allowing what used to be a m...
As you know, I am a novelist, and I really want to write novels. But I knew enough about the Dreyfus case to understand immediately why what happened to Dreyfus was not merely a cause celebre from the end of the 19th century, but an event that could ...
Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its ...
Dr. Zefram Cochrane: I've gotta take a leak. Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge: Leak? I'm not detecting any leak. Dr. Zefram Cochrane: Don't you people from the 24th century ever pee?
[last lines] Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Mr. Data, lay in a course for the 24th century. I suspect our future is there waiting for us. Lieutenant Commander Data: Course laid in, sir. Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Make it so.
Ichabod Crane: The millennium is almost upon us. In a few months, we will be living in the nineteenth century. But our courts continue to rely on medieval devices of torture. High Constable: Stand down. Ichabod Crane: I stand up for sense and justice...
I believe in mysticism, with an interior goal, and you are your own temple and your own priest. I don't believe anymore in religions, because you see today there are religious wars, prejudice, false morals, and the woman is despised. Religion is too ...
Genie: [as tailor] First, that fez and vest combo is much too third century. These patches. What are we trying to say? Beggar? No. Let's work with me here. [after taking measurements, turns Aladdin's rags into fine clothes] Genie: Ooh, I like it! Muy...
