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Bill Bryson Inspirational Quotes (133)

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There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.
Bill Bryson
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
Bill Bryson
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In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
Bill Bryson
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I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Bill Bryson
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I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
Bill Bryson
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As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.
Bill Bryson
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There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
Bill Bryson
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It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.
Bill Bryson
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The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.
Bill Bryson
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You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.
Bill Bryson
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Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you.
Bill Bryson
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I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Bill Bryson
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Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.
Bill Bryson
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
Bill Bryson
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
Bill Bryson
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Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
Bill Bryson
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I tell the kids that, even in a childhood marked by despair and deprivation, I knew that no matter what happened, I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.
Bill Bryson
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I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
Bill Bryson
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You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.
Bill Bryson
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
Bill Bryson
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From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.
Bill Bryson
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Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
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But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
Bill Bryson
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We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
Bill Bryson
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