Quotes by Simon Winchester

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No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.
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The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands’ lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves.
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The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.
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While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in – most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;.
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Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though.
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Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived.
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I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, ‘Wait, I was there.’ That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.
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But to all of this the land itself remain sturdily indifferent and unmoved, the human behavior played out on its surfaces merely trivia. Except, of course, where human behavior induces changes to the ferocity of the weather and the levels of the sea, and land may then fall victim to the climate, and has to alter its shape and size as a result.
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2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
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The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which – together with two Canadian provinces – contribute waters to its flow.
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