Quotes from Tom Head

Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.

As the great German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) put it, kisses leave no traces but wounds leave scars.

The Arda Viraf ("Viraf the just"), which was probably written during the Sassanid period, tells the story of a devout Zoroastrian who travels to heaven and hell and returns to Earth to report what he found. Several centuries later, Dante Alighieri (1265–1341) would write a similar but much longer work, the Divine Comedy, from a Christian perspective.

Legends of the Ancient Giants As is a common characteristic of ancient myths, Aztec stories of the Quinametzin echo similar stories told in other parts of the world. In Genesis 6:4, its ancient Israeli writers tell us about the Nephilim, a race of giants said to have walked the earth prior to the Great Flood.

When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

Although historians often describe Akhenaten as a monotheist, that wasn't exactly right; he believed other gods existed. They just didn't hold a candle to Aten. Aten was something special, something fundamental to the nature of reality itself. This belief in the supremacy of one god over other gods is generally called henotheism

Civilizations never start off as civilizations. Like Sumer, Egypt sprouted from a cluster of river settlements. Sumer had the Tigris and Euphrates, and Egypt had the Nile.

To hear some thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say it, the people of Greece had it all figured out two millennia ago. That's not even remotely true, but what ancient Greece did accomplish in terms of science, architecture, literature, art, and philosophy is certainly enough to explain why so many people have come away with the impression.

People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone . . . . The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten." —Milan Kundera (1929–), author

The fall of the short-lived Weimar Republic, and the subsequent rise of Nazi power, tells us that there is a danger to whittling down the power of our institutions when we cannot yet foresee what will replace them.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." —Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), mathematician and philosopher

Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.