Five Hundred Years Quotes & Sayings

White men are irresponsible with their power and money. Our beautiful earth is million of years old, and in a mere five hundred years, white people have nearly destroyed it. Another hundred years like the last hundred, and there won't be a living creature left on the planet.
-character Amber Johnson (Broken) — J. Matthew Nespoli

I could not understand what these sixty-five thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What good had they gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago?
So these sixty-five thousand people have been reading and hearing of truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate it as a deadly foe. — Anton Chekhov

What the Latins have done in this text (1 John v, 7) the Greeks have done to Paul (1 Tim. iii, 16). They now read, "Great is the mystery of godliness; God manifest in the flesh"; whereas all the churches for the first four or five hundred years, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome as well as the rest, read, "Great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh." Our English version makes it yet a little stronger. It reads, "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." — Isaac Newton

You'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away peel;scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You'll see. — Matthew Antoine

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. — Terence McKenna

The "Avenue," so called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the boughs the air was full of a purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle. — L.M. Montgomery

Five-hundred years ago people were saying in manuscripts, "Can you believe these kids today?" They were saying that same phrase everyone says now. No one can believe the youth and what they're doing and how culture is going and how it might fall apart. — Joel McHale

Marriage emerged some forty-five hundred years ago and evolved into a widespread and accepted institution that bonded families, maintained order, and created wealth. Unlike today, where many of us are searching for our romantic "soul mate," marriage was originally more about economics than deep emotion. — Robi Ludwig

Shanna was across the room with her new husband, chatting happily with Gregori's mother.
With a sly grin, Gregori motioned toward them. Let's go congratulate Roman for taking five hundred years to find a bride. — Kerrelyn Sparks

Seventy years I regard as the limit of the life of man. In these seventy years are contained, without reckoning intercalary months, twenty-five thousand and two hundred days. Add an intercalary month to every other year, that the seasons may come round at the right time, and there will be, besides the seventy years, thirty-five such months, making an addition of one thousand and fifty days. The whole number of the days contained in the seventy years will thus be twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty, whereof not one but will produce events unlike the rest. Hence man is wholly accident. — Herodotus

Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone." He turned his attention to the jurors. "We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We'll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I've traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We've been around since before the Alamo, and" - he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare - "we're touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn't recommend it. — Deeanne Gist

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive. — Joshua Hammer

Five hundred thousand Americans die from tobacco poisoning every year, and it's legal. I don't know, it just that's the - you can't stop giving people organs because of bad behavior. If you keep on having bad behavior, then of course they'll deny you a liver, or whatever you need. — Larry Hagman

Where does American money come from? Steel. Railways. You know how it is over there. It doesn't matter if you murder or rob to get it. The trick is in keeping it for a hundred years, and then you're aristocrats.' 'Is that so different from here?' Brunetti asked. 'Of course,' Padovani explained, smiling. 'Here we have to keep it five hundred years before we're aristocrats. And there's another difference. In Italy, you have to be well-dressed. In America, it's difficult to tell which are the millionaires and which are the servants. — Donna Leon

Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years. — Charles Hermite

Well, we know that eighteen years after that solemn declaration it was disregarded, and the Irish Parliament, which lasted for five hundred years, was destroyed by the Act of Union. Gentlemen, the Act of Union was carried by force and fraud, by treachery and falsehood. — John Edward Redmond

My son, be worthy of your noble name, worthily borne by your ancestors for over five hundred years. Remember it's by courage, and courage alone, that a nobleman makes his way nowadays. Don't be afraid of opportunities, and seek out adventures. My son, all I have to give you is fifteen ecus, my horse, and the advice you've just heard. Make the most of these gifts, and have a long, happy life. — Alexandre Dumas

A century from now," he murmured as he lifted a page and examined it against the light, closing one eye, "almost all the contents of today's libraries will have disappeared. But these books, printed two hundred or even five hundred years ago, will remain intact. We have the books, and the world, that we deserve. . . . Isn't that so, Pablo?" "Lousy books printed on lousy paper. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine. — Anais Nin

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning. — Robin Sloan

The boy is right," Torin said, even though he and Cal were probably close to the same age (well, plus or minus five hundred years, I guess). "And the sooner, the better. We're in stasis now, but something is coming. I sense a-"
"Great disturbance in the Force?" I interrupted before I could stop myself.
Torin frowned. "I suspect you're mocking me, but I don't understand the reference. — Rachel Hawkins

For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, — Dorothy L. Sayers

Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. — W. Somerset Maugham

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words. — Jennifer Egan

It is less than five hundred years since an entire half of the world was discovered. It is less than two hundred years since the discovery of the last continent. The sciences of chemistry and physics go back scarcely one century. — Jeff VanderMeer

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor. — Agnes Repplier

If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. — Steve Jobs

Paintings, like tombstones, will last a good five hundred years, well into twenty or thirty generations. — Robert Genn

The Tyranni rule fifty worlds; they are outnumbered hundreds to one. In such a position, simple force is insufficient. Devious methods, intrigue, assassination are their specialties. The net they weave across space is a wide one, and close-meshed. I can well believe that it extends across five hundred light-years to Earth. — Isaac Asimov

The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. — Greta Christina

We went through the records and we found over five hundred of his patients who were alive and well five years after their treatment, with no cancer. And Dr. Burton didn't selectively give us these. These were "take what you want. Here are the patients I treated." So there was statistical improvement - more so than any cancer institution in the United States could show. — Gary Null

Mars is empty now. Five hundred years from now, it'll be full of people. — Ray Bradbury

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least. — B.F. Skinner

Every day, the temperature of Sol's surface increases by five billionths of a degree, a change of no consequence for thousands of millennia to come. But a few hundred million years from now, barring a fix by our descendants, this relentless heating will substantially change Earth's biosphere in ways that might not be survivable for us. — Seth Shostak

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen. — George Gilder

Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five hundred seconds off. — Mark Twain

A thousand years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, they knew the Earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. — Tommy Lee Jones

I've always considered them ideas, forever recorded." Malone motioned to one of the paperbacks. "Malory wrote King Arthur in the late part of the 15th century. So you're reading his thoughts from five hundred years ago. We'll never know Malory, but we know his imagination. — Steve Berry

At no time within the last five-hundred years can one point to a single instance of the Negro as a race of haters. — Marcus Garvey

If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years. — Vladimir Lenin

One of my prized possessions is a small wooden box with a special lock on it that is more than five hundred years old and works according to a secret code that my grandfather taught me. My grandfather learned it from his grandfather, and his grandfather learned it from his grandfather, and I would teach it to my grandchild if I thought that I would ever have a family of my own instead of living out the remainder of my days all alone in this world. — Lemony Snicket

In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles. — Graham Greene

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case. — Gore Vidal

His wife. Gods above.
He was over five hundred years old - and this... this girl, young woman, she-devil, whatever she was, had just bluffed and lied her way into a job. A sword-thrower indeed. — Sarah J. Maas

I was guaranteed a hundred thousand dollars a year for five years, which was big money in the early 60's. You think, acquiring that should cool you out, but for me it wasn't true. — Dion DiMucci

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny? — Jorge Luis Borges

A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago. — Erle Stanley Gardner

London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line. — Terry Pratchett

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel. — Kate Atkinson

Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand. — Mary Landrieu

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War. — Shelby Foote

This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that's the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time does not elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a wee seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed - and its increasing preciousness as commodity. — Douglas Kennedy

James, you are all the family I have. I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years. I owe you everything, and if you cannot believe I have empathy, perhaps you might at least believe I know honor
honor, and debt
— Cassandra Clare

Long, long ago, (said the voice), five hundred years ago or more, on a winter's day at twilight, a young man entered the Church with a young girl with ivy leaves in her hair. There was no one else there but the stones. No one to see him strangle her but the stones. He let her fall dead upon the stones and no one saw but the stones. He was never punished for his sin because there were no witnesses but the stones. The years went by and whenever the man entered the Church and stood among the congregation the stones cried out that this was the man who had murdered the girl with the ivy leaves wound into her hair, but no one ever heard us. But it is not too late! We know where he is buried! In the corner of the south transept! Quick! Quick! Fetch picks! Fetch shovels! Pull up the paving stones. Dig up his bones! Let them be smashed with the shovel! Dash his skull against the pillars and break it! Let the stones have vengeance too! It is not too late! It is not too late! — Susanna Clarke

Mennonites formed themselves in Holland five hundred years ago after a man named Menno Simons became so moved by hearing Anabaptist prisoners singing hymns before being executed by the Spanish Inquisition that he joined their cause and became their leader. Then they started to move all around the world in colonies looking for freedom and isolation and peace and opportunities to sell cheese. Different countries give us shelter if we agree to stay out of trouble and help with the economy by farming in obscurity. We live like ghosts. Then, sometimes, those countries decide they want us to be real citizens after all and start to force us to do things like join the army or pay taxes or respect laws and then we pack our stuff up in the middle of the night and move to another country where we can live purely but somewhat out of context. — Miriam Toews

Five hundred years from now, who'll know the difference?! — Charles M. Schulz

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years. — C.S. Lewis

Why do I matter to you?" I say, my voice breaking.
"You don't."
"Then why are you doing this?"
"Because I can. Because I slept for five hundred years and now I want some sport. — Melinda Salisbury

The same costume will be Indecent ten years before its time, Shameless five years before its time, Outre (daring) one year before its time, Smart (in its own time), Dowdy one year after its time, Ridiculous twenty years after its time, Amusing thirty years after its time, Quaint fifty years after its time, Charming seventy years after its time, Romantic one-hundred years after its time, Beautiful one-hundred-and-fifty years after its time. — James Laver

This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and indeed at the end of every year, forever and ever. — John Adams

Scotch Kirk, speaking of the precept uttered by Confucius, five hundred years before the time assigned for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth ("Whatsoever ye would not that others should do unto you, do not ye unto them"), says: "That Confucius is the author of this precept is undisputed, and therefore it is indisputable that Christianity has incorporated an article of Chinese morality. — Thomas William Doane

Jonah wondered what JB could possibly find to say without bringing up some touchy topic: Hey, sorry about kidnapping your niece and taking her four hundred years back in time. Sorry she got stuck there for five years. Sorry we had to count on a thirteen-year-old to rescue her. Oh, wait - you don't know about any of that, do you? — Margaret Peterson Haddix

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without. — A.R. Ammons

Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. — Lawrence M. Krauss

You wish to rule the Dreaming City; you must excel in all its ways. Play with me, a single game of Lo Shen. If you best me, I will go into seclusion as you ask, and you will ascend to the Tower without the slightest argument, and without battle. No one will contest you, and you will rule as well as you are able. If you lose, however, you must disband your army, and take the vows of one of our Towers, enter it as a novice, and pledge yourself to our City for the rest of your days. In the Anointed City, this is the way disputes are settled. If you would rule us, you must behave as one of us. Show me that you are the rightful Papess. Show me that you exceed us in all things."
Ragnhild seemed to laugh, but no sound issued from her rosy mouth. Her eyes glittered like snowflakes catching the sun. "You cannot be serious. A single game to decide five hundred years of history?"
"Were it not that once my predecessor harmed you, I would simply kill you where you stand. — Catherynne M Valente

There is no yesterday or tomorrow; there is only this moment. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Three hundred sixty-five days a year. — Philip Toshio Sudo

No airplane could make it. Not since the war. None could venture above a couple hundred feet, the place where the winds began. The winds: the mighty winds that circled the globe, tearing off the tops of mountains and sequoia trees, wrecked buildings, gathered up birds, bats, insects, and anything else that moved, up into the dead belt; the winds that swirled about the world, lacing the skies with dark lines of debris, occasionally meeting, merging, clashing, dropping tons of rubbish wherever they came together and formed too great a mass. Air transportation was definitely out, to anywhere in the world, for these winds circled, and they never ceased. Not in all the twenty-five years of Tanner's memory had they let up. Tanner — Roger Zelazny

The thing about me loving Harry is I'm twelve and he's maybe thirty or thirty-five, whatever, so he'll have to wait like six years for me to grow up. I mean if he kills Hiskott and sets us free, he'll have to wait. He'll never do that. As kind and sweet and brave as he is, he probably has a girl already a hundred others chasing after him. So what I'll have to do is always love him from afar. Unrequited love. That's what they generally call it. I'll love him forever in a deeply, deeply sad kind of way, which maybe you think sounds pretty depressing, but it isn't. Being obsessed about a deeply sad unrequited love can take your mind off the worse things, of which there are thousands, and sometimes it's better to dwell endlessly on what you can't have than on what might happen to you at any moment in Harmony corner. — Dean Koontz

The ability to live for five hundred years would be an incredible gift. But I greatly fear it would be a gift only for the wealthy - one that might greatly widen the gap between those with access and those without. — Ann Leckie

I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes. — Neil Gaiman

For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal. — Walther Von Der Vogelweide

Stop it, girl. There's no way he's five-years-old. Or one hundred. He's probably like every other CEO on the planet: Late twenties, handsome in that geeky sort of way, and just as awkward as you. I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know I'm probably right. — Andrew Shaffer

I remain confident that if faced with such a threat, the West will remember its twenty-five hundred years of tradition, much to the detriment of any possible foe. Having said that, we must all hope our leaders are wise enough to forestall any threat of this magnitude before it manifests itself. Because the Western way of war is brutal. If it is ever again unleashed in all its decisive barbarity, it will be many generations before our enemies recover. — Jim Lacey

The Romans held Britain from the invasion of Julius Caesar till their voluntary withdrawal from the island, A.D. 420,- that is, about five hundred years. — Thomas Bulfinch

For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that "feeding your face" was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have "foodies" and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It took six years - about four and half more than Musk had once planned - and five hundred people to make this miracle of modern science and business happen. — Ashlee Vance

Viola had a harrowing story about riding a bicycle west out of the burnt-out ruins of a Connecticut suburb, aged fifteen, harboring vague notions of California but set upon by passersby long before she got there, grievously harmed, joining up with other half feral teenagers in a marauding gang and then slipping away from them, walking alone for a hundred miles, whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her, wandering into a town through which the Symphony passed five years later. — Emily St. John Mandel

He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs. — Glendon Swarthout

Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to — Kate Atkinson

Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies have been slow to wake up to the importance of MSA (media-specific analysis). Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view. — N. Katherine Hayles

He'd noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays - to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser." "I see," I said. "Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who'll listen." "Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat's-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take one marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious — James Patterson

I was, I remember, nineteen years old, wrote poems, still wore no proper collar, ran out in the rain and snow, always woke up early in the morning, read Lenau, considered an overcoat a superfluous item, received a monthly salary of one hundred twenty-five francs and didn't know what to do with all that money. — Robert Walser

Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between the alpha (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That's essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and weapon types.30 Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language, and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations,31 then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group. — Jonathan Haidt

On present-day Earth we have the most Christ-like nation in human history, a civilization built on loving kindness and demilitarization. They are being wiped off the face of their homeland. Well, at least the Chinese government isn't blaming Christ or Buddha for their actions against Tibet! But many savage pillagers throughout the past two thousand years have, and the Romans of a thousand years ago fall into that category. Within five hundred years they erased nearly all the nature-based, matriarchal tribes in what we now know as Europe. The invaders falsified history in order to justify their greed. Harmless facts and beautiful rituals were twisted to appear Satanic. Love of the environment and its animals and plants, love of healing modalities that modern day health professionals are now searching frantically to recover, were spin-doctored into demented superstition and turned outlaw. — Doug "Ten" Rose

Down at the beginning of the new road, at park headquarters, is the new entrance station and visitor center, where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts answering the same three basic questions five hundred times a day: (1) Where's the john? (2) How long's it take to see this place? (3) Where's the Coke machine? Progress has come at last to the Arches, after a million years of neglect. Industrial Tourism has arrived. What — Edward Abbey

I know what you're thinking and you're wrong. This isn't goodbye, Kitten. I didn't survive over two hundred years to find you only to lose you within five months. I want you, but I'm not saying goodbye to you, because we will get through this. — Jeaniene Frost

The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is highest in the world, will last as long as ... the frog? — Joseph Heller

Not only are we going to shift in our own lives - away from always trying to identify ourselves on the basis of what we have, what we do, and who we are better than, and so on - but shift into more reaching out, more service, more kindness, more living the virtues that Lao Tzu spoke about twenty-five hundred years ago. — Wayne Dyer

The War,' said a soldier proverb, 'will last a hundred years
five years of fighting and ninety-give of winding up the barbed wire. — Preston William Slosson

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. — Stephen Spender

Loving you has been the finest thing I have done in five hundred years ... I do not tell you enough."
She looked up and smiled. "You tell me every night."
"It is not enough ... It is never enough"
"It is enough."
"No." ... "Never enough. It should be the unceasing prayer on my lips. The echo in every breath I take. — Elizabeth Hunter

But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand."
"So we're down to five days instead of five years."
"Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what
we have ten thousand friends. It's called"
she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen
"Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."
She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable. — Robin Sloan

More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient. — Thomas King

That's crazy," Gabriel said. "We must be seventy million years in the past."
"Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million," Ohin said. "It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other.
"Right," Gabriel said. "Of course. That makes perfect sense." Sema was right. He was at a breaking point. And he broke right past it. His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out, falling back into the mattress of the bed. — G.L. Breedon

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another ... — Diane Duane

In today's impoverished dialogue, critiques of liberalism are often naively called "conservative," as if twenty-five hundred years of Western intellectual tradition presented no other alternatives. — Camille Paglia

In a 2006 study, the geneticist Jonathan Pritchard and his colleagues at the University of Chicago announced that there were at least seven hundred regions of the human genome that had clearly undergone positive selection in the last five thousand to fifteen thousand years. Some of the genes affect taste, smell, digestion, and brain function. It is thought that some of these changes resulted from the pressures involved in moving from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to a more agriculture based one. — Christine Kenneally

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same. — Yuval Noah Harari

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

No one has too much time on their hands, even if they had the ability to live five-hundred years. — K.R. Royal