Bill Bryson Quotes

The people who were most intensely interested in the world’s living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

There are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At

There is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From

Three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

To nonlocals

Ugsome,

Untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?

Was a book by Arthur Raistrick called Quakers in Science and Industry and I glanced through it for a few minutes, then carried it to a nearby chair and sat reading for about half an hour, so unexpecte...

Was headed for Nebraska. Now there’s a sentence you don’t want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is p...

We can’t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don’t actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About

You have also been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers...

Zippy new tax called VAT, which was to be introduced a week or so later. The gist of the advertisement was that while some things would go up in price with VAT, some things would also go down. (Ha!) I

«La sua mente e la sua mano andavano di pari passo» scrissero [John Eminges e Henri Condell] nell'introduzione all'in-folio, «e ciò che pensava lo esprimeva con una tale facilità che nelle sue carte n...

When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and...

If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. But here's...

1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt’s predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him the Destroyer and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman’s Magazine—essentially hi...

A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man...

A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in th...