Chuck Bangs

“All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China, and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example, those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area), involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions, whose necessary relation to food production we shall explore in a later chapter. Early writing served the needs of those political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants. Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“...how odd to think of one's life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.
”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“He desperately tried to think of a story to explain his involvement in her sudden appearance, without mentioning the book of magic in his possession.
 ”
― Max Nowaz, The Three Witches and the Master

“It Is Our Duty To Remember”
― Steve Snyder, Shot Down: The True Story of Pilot Howard Snyder and the Crew of the B-17 Susan Ruth