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"Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it."
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Exlpore more Modernity quotes
"With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken-formerly it was only the prominent-and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait."
"Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls."
"And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day."
"For millions of years, man spoke only to what he could see. Suddenly, in just one decade, 'seeing' and 'speaking' have been separated. We think we're used to it, yet we don't realize the immense impact it's had on our reflexes. Our bodies are simply not used to it. Frankly, the result is that, when we talk on the telephone, we enter a state that is similar to certain magical trances; we can discover other things about ourselves."
"These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?"
"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category."
"Everything is much easier in the half-blind and half-deaf world of modern giants that seduce processions of the blind into the world of great emptiness. In their sky the stars shine and their names live in the parallel and independently of their work."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way."
"Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can."
"Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old."
"Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be."
"The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it."
"It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
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