803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

I’m not funny in person. I mean I’m really not. I’m one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.

Don’t ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven’t got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don’t do it.

In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care.

It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity – in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes – an interesting side branch.

As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don’t actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.

As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions – or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.

Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The.