Quotes from Bill Bryson

I may not agree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to be a complete asshole.

While Mesoamericans were harvesting corn and potatoes (and avocados and tomatoes and beans and about a hundred other plants we would be desolate to be without now)

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 Shakespeare.

puckerstoppled

Where America really differs from other countries is in the colossal costs of its health care.

As late as 1921, twenty-seven people perished in a stove fire on a train near Philadelphia.

In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

Smallpox was so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis.)

The inescapable conclusion is that higher spending in America doesn't necessarily result in better medicine, just higher costs.

There were 212 people in Stockholm named Erik Eriksson, 117 named Sven Svensson, 126 named Nils Nilsson, and 259 named Lars Larsson

1921, America had about 200,000 cases of diphtheria; by the early 1980s, with vaccination, that had fallen to just 3. In roughly the same period, whooping cough and measles infections fell from about 1.1 million cases a year to just 1,500. Before vaccines, 20,000 Americans a year got polio. By the 1980s, that had dropped to 7 a year.

The whole system was based upon getting kids to a certain standard and packing their minds with information so they could go on to a good university ... The great failure in education, much of the time, is a lack of excitement and stimulus.

Albert Snyder's mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown.

The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The

past. Often a space-waster, as in this example: 'She has been a teacher at the school for the past 20 years' (Independent). In this sentence, and in countless others like it, 'the past' could be deleted without any loss of sense.

Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.

Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth's land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas. It is a sobering thought that 96 percent of our planet is off-limits to us.

Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language.

thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law's sister-in-law's husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins.

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing—less than 3 percent of its budget—on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.

Sweetheart was originally sweetard

Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.