“In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.”

“We're like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We don't know what's goin to show up here come daylight. We don't even know what color they'll be.”

“...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.”

“Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found...That's out of three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year....Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.”

“It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years. ”

“Solving a problem in a hundred years is, practically speaking, the same as not solving it at all.”