803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

Altogether, according to John McPhee, [geological ages] number in the „tens of dozens.” Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

As Donald Goldsmith notes, when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light years away, what they really mean ('but do not often stress to the general public') is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light years away - not quite the same thing.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it "koagulations viatmin" for its role in blood clotting.

Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask.

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.