The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people;
The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong’s work...
The British geographer Linda Newson produced a magisterial study of the demographic catastrophe in Honduras during the Spanish period, entitled The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under S...
Sometimes it takes courage—maybe all the courage you’ve got—to just live life.
She was like the boy who held his breath until he turned blue. Chimps are just as silly and absurd as human beings. Thank goodness we’re not the only ridiculous species in the world!
She created a new world for herself. It blew my mind to see this animal acquire language. And then literally reshape her world with it.
People need history in order to know themselves,
New York City had a short memory for violence,
Mrs. Trask turned to him. When Mr. Pendergast asks for something, we do not say no.
Moby Dick is my favorite book —I’ve been rereading it every year since I was sixteen. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is the greatest first line in a novel ever written.I, myself, am not fond of animal stories.
Lines from an old film came back to him unbidden: That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability. You’re an improbable person, and so am I.
Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years.
J. P. Morgan once said, If you want something too much, you will not succeed in getting it.
It’s not like Father to be late,
Here we are, two of the world’s experts on chimpanzee behavior, and we have no idea how to control this one animal. And he laughed bitterly. For the first time in my life I felt at a total loss. I had...
God bless the disgruntled employee—no one does more to bring openness to government.
Every year he would select a few projects that he felt had no merit and would award them a golden fleece. As in fleecing the taxpayers.
Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infec...
But when I open them up, I find that they’re equal! And they both have achieved the same destiny: my zinc gurney. Why, then, did he tire himself out poring over so many books? Boh! Take my advice, jou...
I'm pretty much a 9-to-5 kind of guy. I usually get to work about 8 in the morning, and I work until 4 or 5, and sometimes I work on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Pretty much I keep the same hours as...