Bill Bryson Quotes

A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more...

A. L. Rowse—who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion—in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians,...

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of th...

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the ma...

According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.

Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. Newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s, and magazines soon followed. (Benjamin Fra...

After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian...

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery7: first, people deny that it is true; then...

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then...

All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers—indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the p...

All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simp...

All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods.

All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the...

Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides o...

Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakes...

Although the Principia has been called ‘one of the most inaccessible books ever written’7 (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn’t be pestered by mathematical ‘smatterers’, as he ca...

Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot...