Quotes About Comparison

Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All

Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I

Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.

Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.

What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors' Association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard.

It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours – arguably even stronger.

In his secretiveness he didn't merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything – It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked.

By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.

Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ice in the soft drinks, and found that in 70 percent of outlets she surveyed the toilet water was cleaner than the ice.

If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world's population.

The first was the news that if the great American swimmer Buster Crabbe, winner of the 1932 men's 400-meter freestyle, had swum in the present Olympic Games at the same pace he did in 1932 (and admittedly this would be asking a lot, as he has been dead for many years), he would have lost to Ian Thorpe by two full pool lengths. Isn't that amazing?

if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

Bradford hat die Rolle seines Lebens darin gefunden, jeden anderen Ort auf diesem Planeten im Vergleich besser abschneiden zu lassen, und es spielt sie sehr gut.

second largest and other similar comparisons often lead writers astray: 'Japan is the second largest drugs market in the world after the United States' (The Times). Not quite. It is the largest drugs market in the world after the United States or it is the second largest drugs market in the world. The sentence above could be fixed by placing a comma after 'world'.

Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.

I have been mistaken many times for Jane Torvill, on the ice and off.

Women are much better than men in tactile sensitivity with their fingers, but possibly only because they have smaller hands and, therefore, a denser network of receptors.

Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it's just 6 percent

The stomach holds about one and a half quarts, which is not very much compared with other animals. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.

The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates.

English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages