It is a hard lesson to learn and a lesson we most of us need to learn at some point: We cannot assume to know a person's history from their face.
The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.
In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in.
Marriage has historically, as long as there's been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there?
There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.
I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.
I don't know much about my family history except that my father had straight black hair and his ancestors probably came from India.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
Most of our history in space has been communicated in terms of action - what people do, a chronological list of events which have transpired - as opposed to the human experience of having done those things.
My generation of Americans, the scions of daring dreamers, the children of the fearlessly faithful and the offspring of many of history's most audacious actors - we, together, drink deeply from wells of freedom, liberty and opportunity that we did no...
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.
We hear many persuasive voices demanding freedom from restrictions, particularly from moral restraints. However, we learn from the history of the earth that any successful society has had boundaries.
Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.
My view is the less the government can do and the more freedom and opportunity you give people, that trusting people and free people and free enterprise - that America has built the greatest country in the history of the world.
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.
The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern.
I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash.
