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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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Bill Bryson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Effort
Several
Existence
Total
Times
Lived
Eventual
Ever
Number
Cooperative
People
Whose
Cooperatives
Depends
Approximately
Thousand
Risen
Numbers
Efforts

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The universe is not only queerer than we suppose it is queerer than we can suppose
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The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me it's anybody who's funny.
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I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
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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.
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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.
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Science has been quite embattled. It's the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.
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It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
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Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
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In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'
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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.
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Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.
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Life just wants to be but it doesn't want to be much.
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.
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In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.
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It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.
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... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
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The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus
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I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.
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If you believe in god, it's much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that's so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.
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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.
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