People believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities.
Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust.
Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.
History is at once freedom and necessity.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters
Children copy their parents, friends, and teachers. They will develop the habits of the people around them. So if you want your child to be honest, peaceful and happy you should be that way first.
Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.
I don't think that Saddam Hussein is deliberately starving his own people. I would think that a man who gets 99 percent of the people to vote for him in an election and the people love him so much, how would they love a man that is starving them?
Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.