Quotes about History

legends to surround it—giving history to what had just

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

Naturally wealth had a bad reputation. Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns.10 Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord.

If we were talking about Europe in 1000, or most of the third world today, the standard misquotation would be spot on.

The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.

I read the Bible and know little of its history, but the human beings who wrote it were instruments of Divine Power, and Jesus forged a far stronger bond than the ten commandments: love. Birds and monkeys, or any of God's creatures, obey their instincts and merely do what they're programmed to do. In the case of the human being, things are more complicated because we know about love and its traps.

You don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago.

people need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want. "We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.

You can find justification for slavery in the Bible. Some say this is what the Bible says and that closes the argument.

The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat.

Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia.