Bill Bryson Quotes

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustibl...

Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts—in itself quite a radical notion for the time—but

For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age—ice epoch really—started about forty million years ago...

Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.

For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fis...

Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical

We have a universe. It is a place of most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.

Generally speaking – which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking – Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn’t mean going wit...

The Statute of Artificers of 1563 laid down that all artificers (craftsmen) and laborers must be and continue at their work, at or before five of the clock in the morning, and continue at work, and no...

Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.

Wallace, King and Sanders point out in Biology: The Science of Life (that rarest thing: a readable textbook),

In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11’. For the next h...

It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them – at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day c...

The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke36 about a posteriori conclusions – reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. ‘You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,’ he w...

I had a hangover you could sell to science,

We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested3 – probably once belonged to Shake...

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in f...

Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled words two ways on the t...