Bill Bryson

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

Excuse me, but I have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Thomas Malthus

A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of some kind or other in the country that is deserted.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

Each pursues his own theory, little solicitous to correct or improve it by an attention to what is advanced by his opponents.

I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.

In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase forever.

Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes.

The main peculiarity which distinguishes man from other animals is the means of his support-the power which he possesses of very greatly increasing these means.

The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Jean Genet

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.

I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Gertrude Stein

A diary means yes indeed.

A house in the country is not the same as a country house.

A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.

Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

Employees make the best dates. You don't have to pick them up and they're always tax-deductible.

I always wished I had died, and I still wish that, because I could have gotten the whole thing over with.

I am a deeply superficial person.

I had a lot of dates but I decided to stay home and dye my eyebrows.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

I like boring things.

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

I never think that people die. They just go to department stores.

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money.

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Steven Spielberg

A lot of the films I've made probably could have worked just as well 50 years ago, and that's just because I have a lot of old-fashion values.

All of us every single year, we're a different person. I don't think we're the same person all our lives.

Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.

I am an American Jew and aware of the sensitivities involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.

I dream for a living.

I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.

I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday.

I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine.

I'm not really interested in making money.

I've discovered I've got this preoccupation with ordinary people pursued by large forces.

There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.

When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

Thomas Huxley

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

Honore de Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.

The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Allen Ginsberg

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.