Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

A blueprint for disaster in any society is when the elite are capable of insulating themselves.

The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

Ahead of me lies the familiar litany: weakening of the heart, hardening of the arteries, increasing brittleness of bones, decreases in kidney filtration rates, lower resistance of the immune system, and loss of memory. The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Evolution seems indeed to have arranged things so that all our systems deteriorate, and that we invest in repair only as much as we are worth.