From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting dow...
In the 19th Century people were looking for the Northwest Passage. Ships were lost and brave people were killed, but that doesn't mean we never went back to that part of the world again, and I consider it the same in space exploration.
From the moment we were first dumped in Jamestown and had our teeth checked before getting sold off and later considered three-fifths of a human being, an abundance of 'likability' hasn't been something blacks have had to stockpile. Instead, it's bee...
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that ...
We are not post-racial. And in many ways we don't even know how to have a conversation about being post-racial. Until we get out of that old-school way of thinking about race and opportunity and the ability to transcend some of the past of this count...
It's unfortunate that a certain type of stripped-down classicism became the in-house architectural language for 20th-century fascism. Can an architectural language recover from such an association? Yes, I think it can, because in the end what you're ...
If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels...
We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters i...
Prince Feisal: But you know, Lieutenant, in the Arab city of Cordoba were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village? T.E. Lawrence: Yes, you were great. Prince Feisal: Nine centuries ago. T.E. Lawrence: Time to be great ag...
[Max shows Noodles his latest purchase] Noodles: What is it? Max: It's a throne. It was a gift to a pope. It cost me about 800 bucks. Carol: It's from the 17th century. Noodles: What are you going to do with it? Max: I'm sitting on it.
[last lines] Pan: And it is said that the Princess returned to her father's kingdom. That she reigned there with justice and a kind heart for many centuries. That she was loved by her people. And that she left behind small traces of her time on Earth...
Columbus: The plague of the 21st Century, remember mad cow disease? Well mad cow became mad person became mad zombie. It's a fast acting virus that leaves you with a swollen brain, a raging fever, makes you hateful and violent and leaves you with a r...
Only way to recapture the reality into our senses, which thrills the Human heart is to look at the face of it as it is without any lenses put to our consciousness; However now in 21st century, many masks of illusionary paradigms, given a great intell...
We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which co...
The imperative to take notes as one read moved the seventeenth century Jesuit scholar Jeremias Drexel to write that, 'reading is useless, vain and silly when no writing is involved, unless you are reading [devotionally] Thomas a Kempis or some such. ...
I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect. Decedents of the beautiful women that fought so hard for centuries to be equal and not objects of men's will, only their achievement to die in vain. As today's woman single desi...
Although we have refined our behavior over many centuries, the basic perception that we are individual beings, separate from the rest of the world, remains unchanged, and so how we relate to the world remains unchanged. Because separation is an illus...
The last two days I’ve been on long bus rides, driven through the countryside on the back of a motorbike, and crossed rivers on wooden boats, traversing currents into a different century. It’s late and dark, but I’m so close now. My uncle died ...
These books can't possibly compete with centuries of established history, especially when that history is endorsed by the ultimate bestseller of all time." Faukman's eyes went wide. "Don't tell me Harry Potter is actually about the Holy Grail." "I wa...
Up until the 20th century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the world...Our belief today--and it in deeply rooted in eve...
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous a...
