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Exlpore more Society quotes

"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."

"It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."

"The great majority of Baghdad is a slum - a lot of it's new, but it's still slum. It's usually this concrete-block, one-room design with a door and a window, arranged one-up, one-down, often with a shop with nothing in it on the first floor, and then a one-room apartment above it. There's street after street after street of that stuff."

"Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities " but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."

"Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation's history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!"

"Land: A part of the earth's surface, considered as property. The theory that land is property subject to private ownership and control is the foundation of modern society, and is eminently worthy of the superstructure."

"Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy."

"If a media is not criticizing the government, then that media is not a media but just a clown of the government!"
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be."

"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."

"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."

"As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it."

"They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July."

"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."

"It's a bit burned, my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something - a much-loved pet perhaps - salvaged from a tragic house fire. "But I think I scraped off most of the burned part, she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad."

"A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things."

"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."
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