A Quote by John Boyd Orr
In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.
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Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.
More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides in six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book.
Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.
One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.
Women as a class have never subjugated another group; we have never marched off to wars of conquest in the name of the fatherland. We have never been involved in a decision to annex the territory of a neighboring country, or to fight for foreign markets on distant shores. These are the games men play, not us. We want to be neither oppressors nor oppressed. The women's revolution is the final revolution of them all.
The events which transpired five thousand years ago; Five years ago or five minutes ago, have determined what will happen five minutes from now; five years From now or five thousand years from now. All history is a current event.
So many of the wars in history, thousands and thousands of them for the past five, six, seven thousand years, have been related to differences in Truth claims. If we can evolve beyond that problem, then I think there's some chance that we could retire the whole institution of war and begin to focus on the peaceful evolution of humanity.
Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence.
Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.
A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years.
The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.
In the course of history, all empires have been created with premeditation, by an effort often sustained over several generations. Every power has been Roman to a degree. The United States is the first nation to become the most powerful in the world without having sought to be so. Its exceptional energy and organization have never been oriented toward conquest.
There is a direct correlation between what al Qaeda says and what it does. And the one thing that has been the gold standard of correlation has been bin Laden's 1995 - or was it 1996? - pledge that every attack is going to be more powerful than the last. If you go back to the first attack in Yemen in 1992 and chart it out, every attack has been more powerful, more destructive than the last one.
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
But after the spirit of conquest had changed the first governments, all the succeeding ones have, in general, proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost four thousand years.
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