Quotes from Simon Winchester

No American, so far as I am aware, ever professed a deep and unsullied affection for the USGS topographical sheets that it is possible to order from the government agencies. They are fine enough maps, and they cover the entirety of the nation. But seldom are they bought for the sheer pleasure of ownership, of the ability to pore over them and imagine, or remember, to draw contented admiration at their elegant appearance and scrupulous accuracy.

John Ruskin once noted that "to paint water in all its perfection is as impossible as to paint the soul.

Most plates move relatively slowly—the North American Plate, for example, is shifting westward at about twenty millimeters a year, somewhat less than the rate at which human fingernails grow. The Pacific Plate is, by contrast, something of a speed demon: it moves ten times as rapidly, and in a habitual northwesterly direction, covering something like two centimeters each year.

Dai Qing was languishing in prison. She stayed there for ten months, the country's first "green" victim, though in truth a dissident, like so many scores of others.3

It was a dispute of such gravity—linguists and philologists were known to be mercurial and hold eternal grudges—that

appointed vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, calculated that God made the world on October 23, 4004 BC, but he was able to further refine Ussher's arithmetic, proving that God got started at exactly 9:00 that morning, presumably after His breakfast.

With geology—a knowledge-based account of the nature of planet Earth, which one might legitimately regard as the ur-science—now unleashed from churchly teaching, other kinds of rational thinking started to seep into and infect all the other realms of natural philosophy. Science in its most general sense took off as a legitimate field of study and challenge, and the free-thinking rationality and free will that is the

the hallmark of the Enlightenment was off to the races.

Such a series of hammer blows! Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly really rather—dare one say it?—insignificant. He may not after all have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created. The Book of Genesis, believed by so many to be Holy Writ, was perhaps no more than the stuff of myth and ancient legend. And now even the continents themselves, long supposed to be the most reliable and unshifting bedrock of our very existence, had become mobile.

I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.

John Templeton's views are regarded by some as eccentric, naive, or dangerously anti-science but by many others as thoughtful, positive, and in today's increasingly unhinged world, vitally necessary.

the lifting against the natural force of gravity of two-hundred-odd tons of airplane and three-hundred-odd human beings to an entirely unsustainable altitude of seven or so miles, and then propelling all without interruption for many long hours, suspended by nothing more than a lately realized principle of physics, high above a cold and highly dangerous expanse of sea.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.

The clash between those who built fortresses and those who drove wagons or sailed ships was a central part of early human life—

And there are the girls—young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears—who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.

it was a brave man who ate the first oyster

The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in Gloucestershire.

Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

the relatively peaceable inland sea of the classical world was to prove a training ground, a nursery school, for those sailors who in time, and as an inevitable part of human progress, would prove infinitely more daring and commercially ambitious than the Minoans.

Teach Your Children Well A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity. —attributed to Samuel Johnson, dedication to Jerónimo Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, 1775

To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.

According to many lexical authorities, the word that Londoners used for traders from the Hanseatic eastern cities—easterlings—became shortened and incorporated into the English language as the word sterling, with its implied meaning of solid reliability.

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 faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.