Quotes from Bill Bryson

Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology. It

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.

in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English—a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A

quarks," a collective term that encompasses all particles that are governed by the strong nuclear force.

Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In

It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake.

Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day.

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It's like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, "Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.

You have your whole life ahead of you. But here's the thing to remember. You will always have your whole life ahead of you. That never stops and you shouldn't forget it.

Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.

People are so addicted to convenience that they have become trapped in a vicious circle: The more labor-saving appliances they acquire, the harder they need to work; the harder they work, the more labor-saving appliances they feel they need to acquire.

Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.

We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn't always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.

If ever there was an event that challenges the concept of intelligent design, it is the act of childbirth. No woman, however devout, has ever in childbirth said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking this through for me.

Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.

Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones.

Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which most people will happily-indeed, unthinkingly-drive an extra couple of miles to walk thirty less feet.

Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. The

It wasn't until the 1860s, and some landmark work by Louis Pasteur in France, that it was shown conclusively that life cannot arise spontaneously but must come from pre-existing cells.