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No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

The technology of the time dictated the way things looked.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication - particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.

The story of 'Mirror Mirror' is in many ways a story about evolution. It's about the evolution of a child into an adult. It's about the evolution of those dwarves into something a little less rock-like, a little more humanoid. It's about the evolution of history, too, from the darkness of the Middle Ages into the light of the Age of Reason.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge.

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization.

The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

I am always struck by the fact that human awareness of our place in nature, like so much of modern science, began with the Industrial Revolution.