For thousands of years, there have been lies about being gay or not being gay. If you know they’re lies, you’re free.

It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.

It was very important thousands of years ago to categorize things. I can eat that plant, I can’t eat that plant. Or this tribe, not that tribe. We don’t have to do that anymore – we have processed food now!

When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

Imagine thousands and thousands of years ago, when the human race was born in Africa, if we’d not allowed them to get out of Africa then we wouldn’t exist.

We’ve been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years – look at a poodle! So we’ve created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn’t be here were it not for us.

It’s our human nature to explore. Tens of thousands of years ago, our species walked out of Africa, traveling far and wide across the entire planet, from the Arctic to the tip of Tierra Del Fuego, making us the most geographically diversified species on Earth.

For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn’t focus too much on the bad.

Human exploration is something that’s been going on for thousands of years, and the models that worked 500 years ago are likely to work again today.

The marriage of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored in all cultures and by every religious faith. It’s in this institution that children are meant to be nurtured. We know this after thousands of years of human experience.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

We have domesticated crops over a very long period of time, like tens of thousands of years. And crops get – seeds get carried. Sometimes, if they’re very small seeds, they get scattered off trucks. Pollen travels.

The coronation is a symbol of power, but it’s not a symbol for us the people. It’s a symbol for that person, who is a human, to become a higher being and become one with God. The church, the scepter, and the crown have been around forever. And the line of kings of England goes back thousands of years.

I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife… I was unable to accept that we couldn’t solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.

I think Judas was a very devout religious Jewish person. He realizes that Jews had been persecuted and enslaved for thousands of years, and he wants to keep his people from going through that anymore.

We’re never gonna get rid of crazy people. They’ve been around for thousands of years – they’ll continue to be around; they’ll continue to do horrible things.

AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.

I feel so honored to be a mom and get to do something that women have done for thousands of years.

How brittle life is, yet it’s been going on for thousands and thousands of years. Maybe we should sit down and pay tribute to life instead of just destruction.

Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can’t figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they’ve always gotten killed doing it. And they’ve always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived.

Thousands of years of human history have shown that the ideal setting for children to grow up is with a mother and a father committed to one another, living together, and sharing the responsibility of raising their children.

The history of screenwriting – of what we do – is more than 100 years old. It’s thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only – the only – separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

The Delaware Estuary has sustained a human population for thousands of years, but by the end of the 19th Century, increased population and industrialization had transformed much of the upper Estuary watershed.

My dream was to ride a horse from Mongolia to Hungary, 10,000 km across the great Eurasian Steppe, and in doing so, come to understand the nomadic cultures that have presided there for thousands of years.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

Our youths are constantly trying to learn everything the West has to teach, but what is newest in the West has existed in China for thousands of years.

Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling redwood space over redwood time, over thousands of years.

China and India are close neighbours linked by mountains and rivers and the Chinese and Indian peoples have enjoyed friendly exchanges for thousands of years.

Well I actually think. I think it’s a dinosaur… Have you ever seen the photos of Loch Ness? If you haven‘t by the way Google it. They look like diplodocus but in the water. These sightings have been going on for thousands of years and the first written account of Nessie was 1500 years ago.

We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we’ve been living in cities, we’ve become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.

The medicines of today are based upon thousands of years of knowledge accumulated from folklore, serendipity and scientific discovery. The new medicines of tomorrow will be based on the discoveries that are being made now, arising from basic research in laboratories around the world.

Pawn shops have been around for thousands of years – they were the number one form of consumer credit up until the 1950s, but we were vilified by Hollywood. We were easy people to vilify.

The future for us is the foreseeable future. The South Asian, however, feels that it is perfectly realistic to think of a ‘long time‘ in terms of thousands of years.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.

All of us, who are members of the Germanic peoples, can be happy and thankful that once in thousands of years fate has given us, from among the Germanic peoples, such a genius, a leader, our Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, and you should be happy to be allowed to work with us.

I surely don’t think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance – like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking – seems to have its uses.

Learning in a face-to-face human community, as humans have evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years, may always be the ideal – especially in an endeavor that is as relationship-driven as business.

There was a minor burst of macho nuttiness after ‘Jaws’ came out, in which people would go off in shark tournaments and come back holding the bloody heads of these animals and say, ‘Look what I did.’ But they’ve been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years anyway.

There’s a great tradition in storytelling that’s thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that’s really what I wanted to do.

People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska‘s North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho.

Because our generation has waited so long to have babies, we feel we’ve ‘discovered‘ something that women have been doing for thousands of years. I have no illusions that I will be in the same situation as the average working mother. I’m not trying to prove anything – I just want to have kids.

People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it’s when birds stop singing that people need to worry.

We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, ‘And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,’ people wouldn’t have understood what he said. So he didn’t.

Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings.

I don’t know what kind of courage it took thousands of years ago, but I know how courageous women need to be today.

It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion.

It’s been argued that of all the animals humans have domesticated, the horse is the most important to our history. For thousands of years, horses were our most reliable mode of transportation.

Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.

For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we’ve read is from the male point of view.

Society may no longer define marriage in the only way marriage has ever been defined in the annals of recorded history. Many societies allowed polygamy, many allowed child marriages, some allowed marriage within families; but none, in thousands of years, defined marriage as the union of people of the same sex.

Narrative has been part of human consciousness for a long time. And if it has played a part in all those thousands of years, it will know a trick or two. It will be wise. It will be mischievous. It will be helpful. It will be generous.

As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands.

The monarchy is thousands of years old and has experienced many things like ‘The Crown’ in the past. They’re always changing and evolving; that’s the thing. They have to.

From food trucks to hot dog stands to county fair favorites, ‘street food’ has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.

In a few hundred years you have achieved in America what it took thousands of years to achieve in Europe.

For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

Thousands of years and many civilizations have defined a marriage as the union between one man and one woman. With few exceptions, those civilizations that did not follow that perished.

Patronage is a very old phenomenon that’s occurred in people and in society for thousands of years. It stems from an emotional response to someone’s art. It’s a feeling of responsibility and importance and a desire to be a part of what they’re making.

For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

We’ve been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.

The people of India and Arabia have interacted across the waters between them for thousands of years.

We have lived for thousands of years together, Muslims and Christians; we are part of the same society.

The custom of clasping hands is thought to date back thousands of years, as proof of not holding any weapons.

Christianity, with or without its whole apparatus of dogma, will endure in its essence for thousands of years after us; there will always be spiritually-minded people who will be ennobled by it, and some made great.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.

For thousands of years, we’ve insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.

Proponents of same-sex marriage regularly label opponents ‘radical‘ and ‘extremist.’ However, given that no society in thousands of years has allowed same-sex marriage, it is, by definition, the proponents of same-sex marriage whose position is radical and extreme.

My thinking is that if we’re going to take from a culture, let’s take from a culture that has exemplified success for thousands of years.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman’s intelligence was a man’s deception.

One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that’s been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.

Nobody who’s thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn’t come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can’t just say, ‘Well, it’s the will of the people.’

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

In music, which was my world before, you’ve got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.

Theater is an old thing. It’s thousands of years old. TV isn’t. Film isn’t. We’re doing a really old thing.

We believe that the Arab world has been there for centuries, and thousands of years, and it’ll keep on continuing being there. All we have to do is work together.

There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

I’d rather there wasn’t an afterlife, really. I’d much rather not be me for thousands of years.

Men aren’t the way they are because they want to drive women crazy; they’ve been trained to be that way for thousands of years. And that training makes it very difficult for men to be intimate.

More than 90% of Chinese believe themselves to be Han. Of course, such a vast population is derived from countless different races, but because China has enjoyed such a long and continuous history as a polity, there has been thousands of years of mixing, melding and assimilation.

The marvelous thing is that for thousands of years people have continued questioning and searching and ultimately concluding that reasons for certain occurrences are not given to man to know.

There is a reason why the cultures of Indigenous Australia inspire such fascination. And that is that they represent a unique way of thinking about the world. A vision that over tens of thousands of years has risen out of the land, the power, the very being of our continent, Australia.

For thousands of years, we did have death surrounding us, and we did have people die in the home. You would take care of your own end. You would do ritual processes, and you would be involved in it, and that’s been taken away in the Western world.

The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that’s not the same thing as saying they’re incompatible. It’s just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

That’s a mistake I think that a lot of Western observers make is to assume that Korean nationalism is hundreds if not thousands of years old. When in fact nationalism is incompatible with Korean Confucian tradition.

For thousands of years, the most physically imposing buildings on earth were temples, churches, and mosques. But in the 20th century, new houses of worship came to dominate the landscape. Yankee Stadium is the most storied of these contemporary shrines.

So much music in Africa was created for specific moments, written for rituals or for a funeral or for challenges, thousands of years ago, and these rhythms are still used.

Gold has worked for thousands of years, but now with the Internet, it works even better.

Several times in Earth’s history, rapid global warming occurred, apparently spurred by amplifying feedbacks. In each case, more than half of plant and animal species became extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine.

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years.

Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don’t think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.

Growing up in eastern Turkey, I was not really involved with the family business – sheep and cow farming, yogurt and cheese making. But I think I learned from my father the unspoken business language or instincts that go back thousands of years.

So much of Islam is Judeo-Christianity. It’s impossible to divorce them. Islam is 600 years after Christ. Thousands of years after Judaism. Christ, Moses, Abraham – they are all in the Koran.

The majority of modern medicines originate in nature. Although some mushrooms have been used in therapies for thousands of years, we are still discovering new potential medicines hidden within them.

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

There are so many ideas in my mind of old craftsmanship and food we have been enjoying for thousands of years. Some are on the verge of oblivion. I hope to preserve them through my small efforts.

My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what’s really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what’s happening in the world.

For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don’t see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.

Historical records show that smallpox was a human scourge for thousands of years. The virus produces high fever, severe back pain and scarring eruptions of flat red spots on the skin that turn into pustules and then into scabs – a two-week process during which the disease is highly contagious.

There’s a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.