Life Enhancement:: If Only Galantamine Could Talk From ancient Greece to the Soviet Union—an improbable but n that usually misquoted comment, Ford went on to say, “It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” Ford was a man driven to get results—he also said, “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Whether you agree with him or not, his take on history is thought-provoking. Perhaps the best way to look at history is to try to extract from it whatever lessons are useful in our efforts to make history today. If all this still sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that many ancient legends are now believed to have been based on historical facts—with liberal embellishments, such as gods and goddesses and monsters and magic potions, for literary purposes. (Have you never spiced up a story for effect?) By tuning out the embellishments and exaggerations, and by focusing on what was actually possible according to the laws of science and what we know about the natural world at the time and place in question, modern scholars have been remarkably successful in explaining the probable factual bases for many legends, including Biblical stories, that once seemed beyond the realm of reason.
