Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything.

We can begin to see there are no isolated patterns. The universe has some favorites, and they repeat and they repeat, at every scale.

All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.

The history of humanity really can be seen as the history of man's response to certain great ideas which are put into the mind-belt, into the mind of humanity... So it has been down through all the ages [...]

Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.

It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations.

An irresistible cycle seemed to operate, repeating patterns of the ancient world where civil strife and war brought disaster... I surmised that patterned and predictable changes were in turn rooted in the very nature of civilization—the ineluctable breaker of custom and eroder of moral codes, and itself a product and expression of rapid technological and social change.

It became clear... through quantitative historical analysis that [throughout time] complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a... degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces...

The mixture of highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in our history.

Our brains are really not equipped to process events on the geologic scale—at least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here and now. Five hundred million years is a long time, but how about the mad rush of events in just the past 2,000 years [of written history] starring the human race? Rather action-packed, wouldn’t you say? Everything [that was recorded in written form] from the Roman Empire to the Twin Towers, with a cast of billions—emperors, slaves, saviors, popes, kings, queens, armies, navies, rabbles, conquest, murder, famine, art, science, revolution, comedy, tragedy, genocide, and Michael Jackson. Enough going on in a mere 2,000 years to divert anyone’s attention from the ultimate fate of the earth, you would think. Just reflecting on the events of the twentieth century alone could take your breath away, so why get bent out of shape about the ultimate fate of the earth? Yet I was not soothed by these thoughts... because I couldn’t shake the recognition that in the short term, we are in pretty serious trouble, too.

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told.

The long history of mankind is studded with convergences, perhaps most notably in social systems and the use of artefacts and technology. But for human history, set in the arrow of time, there appears to be one intolerable stumbling-block. This is the catastrophic failure in human values and decency.

Looked at from the perspective of twentieth-century earth, we see three great stages in the dynamic process of the universe. To this whole process, as it spreads out over perhaps ten billion years of time and ten billion light years of space, we give the name evolution, and we see three great patterns within it. The first is physical evolution. This presumably started with the development of the most elementary particles (whatever they may be); then of neutrons, protons, electrons, and radiations; then of elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond formed by combining protons and electrons; then of chemical compounds; then finally of increasingly complex molecules from amino acids, and proteins to the great watershed of DNA, the beginnings of life.

As I studied history, I saw that it typically transpires via relatively well-defined life cycles, like those of organisms, that evolve as each generation transitions to the next.