It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves.

Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.

Somewhere in the Bill of Rights is a Pig Amendment; our freedom to stuff ourselves cannot be abridged. Having so stuffed, we demand a technological solution to…

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of last…

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimil…

I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -- sproing!-- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the i…