Quotes from Simon Winchester

young orphaned Bertrand initially faltered—until the moment when, at age eleven, his older brother introduced him to the logical purity of Euclidean geometry. Suddenly mathematics, as well as a near-fanatical interest in peace, became the young man's watchwords. It was then that he began his "relentless search for knowledge," as he later described it, which seems to characterize all soi-disant polymaths, of which he was to be a prime exemplar.

Soon so many tens of thousands of pioneers were going, so long were the trains of wagons, that perplexed Indians in Wyoming said they might themselves head off to the East, believing it to be fast emptying of all white people.

They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present.

But though it was to be an economical crossing, one step up from steerage, in the Canadian Pacific offices off Trafalgar Square—more cathedral than bureau, all teak, marble, and hush, and with scale models of famous ocean liners from the old days illuminated in the windows—even this most modest of transactions was handled with dignity and circumstance.

The last surviving slave from the last arriving slaver died in 1935, in a suburb of Mobile, Alabama.

learning comes only from the taking of chances and risk

and his youngest sister, Henrietta, lived to a great age, also beside the sea, with a vast collection of cats—having previously traveled around England carrying a portable stove that allowed her to cook her beloved sausages in the privacy of her various bedrooms. She also once mistakenly took an alarm clock to church with her, instead of a Bible, with predictably catastrophic results.

after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling.

I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident."   Although

The remains of sixty thousand young seamen now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. More men had died there in the five years of the Second World War than in all of the conflicts in the ocean since the first Romans had set out on their invading expeditions nearly two thousand years before.

The explosion itself was terrific, a monstrous thing that still attracts an endless procession of superlatives. It was the greatest detonation, the loudest sound, the most devastating volcanic event in modern recorded human history, and it killed more than thirty-six thousand people.

Now, seen from a palm plantation high on a green hillside, Krakatoa looks peaceful and serene, with just a thin column of white or gray or on occasion black smoke easing up from its summit. But looks are deceptive: All the while the child-mountain is growing steadily and rapidly, as the elemental fires that created the world rage deep inside.

As the historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin once put it: "What is remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while without discovering America.

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.

I don't hero worship for the sake of hero worship. When I find people who are truly remarkable - and I think Joseph Needham is a classic example - I do value their counsel.

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.

We associate the North Atlantic with cod. The motto of Newfoundland used to be 'In cod we trust.' It was a joke, but it was essentially true. But there is no cod anymore. And that's extraordinary. It's all because of either greed or politics - Canadian politics.

The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event - not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics - then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air—it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were—who knew?

In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.

The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.