“ Sophisticated human beings were on hand to see this volcano's convulsions, they were able to investigate the event, and they were able to attempt to understand the processes that had caused such dread… Simon Winchester
“ The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new… Simon Winchester
“ No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a lang… Simon Winchester
“ No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses. And Simon Winchester
“ He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell. Simon Winchester
“ God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; Simon Winchester
“ But wait—was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn’t the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn’t we all now take for granted a body of water th… Simon Winchester
“ The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining. Simon Winchester
“ Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadrupe… Simon Winchester
“ The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which… Simon Winchester
“ The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a c… Simon Winchester
“ The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which—together with two Canadian provinces—contribute waters to its flow. Simon Winchester
“ And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. I am a nobody, he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. Treat me as a solar m… Simon Winchester
“ Worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his… Simon Winchester
“ The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air—it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Briton… Simon Winchester
“ The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today—Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia—even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and rive… Simon Winchester
