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Robert Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (22 April 1904 – 18 February 1967) was an American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project.

Quotes
With a low moon over the desert that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten, what with the cold and the sweating and the ranges barring the sky. And when we found it again, In the dry hills down by the river, half withered, we had the hot winds against us. There were two palms by the landing; The yuccas were flowering; there was a light on the far shore, and tamarisks. We waited a long time, in silence. Then we heard the oars creaking and afterwards, I remember, the boatman called us. We did not look back at the mountains.
 * It was evening when we came to the river
 * "Crossing" describing memories of New Mexico in Hound and Horn (June 1928)

 * I can't think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends.
 * Letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 135

 * Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
 * Letter to his brother Frank (14 October 1929), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 136

 * I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of the freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror — But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.
 * Letter to his brother Frank (12 March 1932), published in Robert Oppenheimer : Letters and Recollections (1995) edited by Alice Kimball Smith, p. 155

 * It worked!
 * His exclamation after the Trinity atomic bomb test (16 July 1945), according to his brother in the documentary The Day After Trinity

 * It is with appreciation and gratefulness that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, and for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at the scroll and all that it signifies, with pride. Today that pride must be tempered by a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish. This war that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them in other times, and of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our minds we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in humanity.
 * Acceptance Speech, Army-Navy "Excellence" Award (16 November 1945)

 * Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
 * Physics in the Contemporary World, Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at M.I.T. (25 November 1947)

 * The extreme danger to mankind inherent in the proposal [to develop thermonuclear weapons] wholly outweighs any military advantage.
 * Robert Oppenheimer et al., Report of the General Advisory Committee, 1949

 * There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry … There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.
 * As quoted in "J. Robert Oppenheimer" by L. Barnett, in Life, Vol. 7, No. 9, International Edition (24 October 1949), p. 58; sometimes a partial version (the final sentence) is misattributed to Marcel Proust.

 * Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.
 * "Encouragement of Science", an address at Science Talent Institute (6 March 1950), Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 7, #1 (Jan 1951) p. 6-8

 * We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.
 * "Atomic Weapons and American Policy", Foreign Affairs (July 1953), p. 529

 * The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community.
 * Science and the Common Understanding (1953)

 * The history of science is rich in the example of the fruitfulness of bringing two sets of techniques, two sets of ideas, developed in separate contexts for the pursuit of new truth, into touch with one another.
 * Science and the Common Understanding (1954); based on 1953 Reith lectures.

 * There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
 * Interview with Edward R. Murrow, A Conversation with J. Robert Oppenheimer (1955)

 * Much has been said of the prospect that man, along with many other forms of life...would disappear as a species. In time, not a long time, that may come to be possible. What is more certain and more immediate is that we would lose much of our human inheritance, much that has made our civilization and our humanity...the threat of the apocalypse will be with us for a long time; the apocalypse may come.
 * Science and our Times, 1956

 * It's not that I don't feel bad about it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday.
 * Response to question on his feelings about the atomic bombings, while visiting Japan in 1960.

 * We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
 * Interview about the Trinity explosion, first broadcast as part of the television documentary The Decision to Drop the Bomb (1965), produced by Fred Freed, NBC White Paper; the translation is his own. Online video is at atomicarchive.com
 * The "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" line, spoken to the prince Arjuna by Krishna (not Vishnu, although Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu), is usually translated differently. Oppenheimer's Sanskrit teacher, Arthur Ryder, translated it as "Death am I, and my present task. / Destruction." Most translations tend to translate it as "time" or "terrible time." Either way, the point is the same: Arjuna is reluctant to go to war, and Krishna has been exhorting him to fulfill his duties as a prince despite his misgivings. Ultimately, Krishna is saying, Arjuna is just an instrument of death acting on his behalf, unable to stop the fate of death that comes to all eventually. Arjuna, suitably humbled, agrees to engage in battle. See discussion at Alex Wellerstein, "Oppenheimer and the Gita," _Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog_ (23 May 2014), drawing upon the research of James A. Hijiya, "The Gita of J. Robert Oppenheimer," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144, no. 2 (June 2000), 123-167. Hijiya argues that contrary to most common interpretations of Oppenheimer's quote, it is not about Oppenheimer claiming to be "death, the destroyer of worlds" himself, but is an analogy about responsibility and duty.

 * However, it is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our report would have been the same.
 * Oppenheimer testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings, discussing the American reaction to the first successful Russian test of an atomic bomb and the debate whether to develop the "super" hydrogen bombs with vastly higher explosive power; from volume II of the Oppenheimer hearing transcripts, pg266. Date: Tuesday, April 13.
 * I think it is the opposite of true. Let us not say about use. But my feeling about development became quite different when the practicabilities became clear. When I saw how to do it, it was clear to me that one had to at least make the thing. Then the only problem was what would one do about them when one had them. The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue also that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. It was purely the military, the political and the humane problem of what you were going to do about it once you had it...
 * Oppenheimer testifying in his defense in his 1954 security hearings. Date: Friday, April 16.

 * But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.
 * Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (2 November 1945)

 * His early papers are paralyzingly beautiful but they are thoroughly corrupt with errors, and this has delayed the publication of his collected works for almost ten years. Any man whose errors can take that long to correct is quite a man.
 * Memorial lecture delivered on 13 December 1965 at UNESCO headquarters to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Albert Einstein's death, as quoted in Silvan S. Schweber, Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 279-280.

 * Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.
 * Last published words With Oppenheimer on an Autumn Day, Look, Vol. 30, No. 26 (19 December 1966)

 * It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
 * As quoted in "Why Curiosity Driven Research?" by Robert V. Moody (17 February 1995)

 * Because I was an idiot.
 * Oppenheimer's explanation for why he lied to security officers on the Manhattan Project about the so-called Chevalier Affair, in which he claimed to have been approached to assist with Soviet atomic espionage during World War II. Testimony of J. Robert Oppenheimer in U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, _In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer_ (GPO, 1954), on 137.

 * I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.
 * Words spoken to his class at Berkeley during the period 1932-1934, as quoted by Wendell Furry in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, p. 84

 * The Bhagavad Gita is the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.
 * Attributed. in Glimpses of India Jaideva C. Goswami, and Royal, Denise The Story of J Robert Oppenheimer St. Martin's Press New York 1969p. 54 x

 * The general notions about human understanding ... which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture, they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.
 * Attributed. Pt. Deendayal Upadhyay Ideology & Preception - Part - 1: An Inquest, D B Tengadi  and in Capra, Fritjof The Tao of physics: an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism New York: Bantam Books, 1977.p. 18, and in The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

 * Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
 * Attributed. as quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture and in History of Ancient India Revisited, A Vedic-Puranic View, Omesh K. Chopra, page 399 and in Glimpses of India  Jaideva C. Goswami

Misattributed

 * The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true.
 * This is derived from a statement of James Branch Cabell, in The Silver Stallion (1926) : The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Quotes about Oppenheimer

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * J. Robert Oppenheimer had graduated from Fieldston (the branch on Central Park West, then named the Ethical Culture School) in 1921, and while Minsky was there the memory of Oppenheimer’s student days was still fresh. “If you did anything astonishing at Fieldston, some teacher would say, ‘Oh, you’re another Oppenheimer,’ ” Minsky recalled. “At the time, I had no idea what that meant.”
 * Marvin Minsky, quoted in
 * Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding.
 * Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in:

 * He was the genius of the nuclear weapons age and also the walking, talking conscience of science and civilisation; most of the great questions surrounding him as a person were the greatest questions of that time. He was born into an intellectual New York Jewish family and as a young man experienced the revolution in theoretical physics in the 1920s at first hand in Europe, before settling in California and building a world-class research centre there. Though he had no record as a manager, when war came he was chosen as the Manhattan Project's chief scientist and his inspirational leadership saw it through to success. Peace found him a national hero and a powerful voice in Washington, but he was also increasingly anxious about the drift into Cold War. These qualms made him enemies, so his pre-war left-wing past was dredged up and, at those 1954 hearings, he was subjected to what one observer called a "dry crucifixion". … Not a shred of credible evidence was ever produced to suggest that the man was disloyal, still less that he was a spy. The worst that could be proved against him was one or two lapses of judgement in dealings with left-wing friends in the early years of the war — piffling faults, as Isidor Rabi pointed out, when set beside his achievements. So demented were his enemies that, even after what they described as his "unfrocking" — the official decision that he did indeed pose a risk to national security — they insisted he was on the brink of defecting to the Soviet Union and so must continue to be followed and bugged wherever he went.
 * Brian Cathcart, in "Atomised" in The New Statesman (10 January 2008)

 * The custom for these colloquia was that Oppenheimer, a very punctual guy, would walk out on stage from one of the wings, make a few general remarks in his own quiet way, and then introduce the speaker. Not this time. He arrived very late and entered the theater from the rear, strode down the aisle while all of us rose and cheered him, stomped our feet and in general behaved like a pack of bloodthirsty savages welcoming back their conquering warriors, who were displaying the heads or genitals, or both, of the conquered. When Oppenheimer was able to finally quiet down the mob, he set about telling us what little was known about the results of the bombing. There was one thing he knew for sure: the “Japs” (not Japanese) didn’t like it. More howling, foot stomping, and the like. Then he got to the nub of the matter: While we apparently had been successful, and his chest was practically bursting with pride, he did have one deep regret, that we hadn’t completed the Bomb in time to use against the Germans. That really brought down the house. This had to be the most fascinating, to say nothing about being the most historic, speech I’ve ever heard. Apart from those who were there that night, I don’t recall ever meeting anyone who had ever heard of it. There’s an explanation for this that I won’t bother to go into here because that’s not what I’m writing about. That’s a matter for a good investigative reporter with an historic bent to go into, and maybe get himself a Pulitzer award.
 * Samuel T. Cohen, on statements made by Oppenheimer, just after the bombing of Hiroshima, in F*** You! Mr. President: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2006)

 * His theoretical prediction of black holes was by far his greatest scientific achievement, fundamental to the modern development of relativistic astrophysics, and yet he never showed the slightest interest in following it up. So far as I can tell, he never wanted to know whether black holes actually existed. ...We know that the Oppenheimer-Snyder calculation is correct and describes what happens to massive stars at the end of their lives. It explains why black holes are abundant, and incidentally confirms the truth of Einstein's theory of general relativity. And still, Robert Oppenheimer was not interested. ...How could he have remained blind to his greatest discovery? ...Perhaps if the Oppenheimer-Snyder calculation had not happened to coincide with the Bohr-Wheeler theory of nuclear fission and with the outbreak of World War II, Robert would have paid more attention to it.
 * Freeman Dyson, The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

 * In later years I found a key to the character of Robert by comparing him with Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence was in many ways like Robert, a scholar who came to greatness through war, a charismatic leader, and a gifted writer, who failed to readjust happily to peacetime existence after the war, and was accused with some justice of occasional untruthfulness.
 * Freeman Dyson, The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

 * His flaw was restlessness, an inborn inability to be idle. Intervals of idleness are probably essential to creative work on the highest level. Shakespeare, we are told was habitually idle between plays.
 * Freeman Dyson, The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

 * Robert was well aware of his own weakness. In later life he never spoke of himself directly, but he occasionally expressed his inner thoughts obliquely by quoting poetry. Especially from George Herbert, his favorite poet.
 * Freeman Dyson, The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

 * The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him — the United States government. ... [T]he problem was simple: All Oppenheimer needed to do was go to Washington, tell the officials that they were fools, and then go home.
 * Albert Einstein, to Abraham Pais, as quoted in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in: . Einstein felt that Oppenheimer was a _narr_ (fool) for going through with his security hearing.

 * One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it. So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead." It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
 * Richard Feynman, from the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures on Science and Society, University of California at Santa Barbara (1975)

 * We made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb, and for better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world. So I would really like to dedicate this to the peacemakers everywhere.
 * Cillian Murphy, "Cillian Murphy Wins Best Actor: “I Would Really Like to Dedicate This to the Peacemakers”" in Vanity Fair (10 March 2024)

 * ...The suspension of the clearance of Dr. Oppenheimer was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done. In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance and go through all this sort of thing, he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it So it didn't seem to me the sort of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and we have a whole series of Super bombs, and what more do you want, mermaids? This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can't help but be humiliating, I thought it was a pretty bad show. I still think so.
 * Isidor Isaac Rabi, testifying during Oppenheimer's 1954 security hearing on why he felt the hearing was an unnecessary and inappropriate activity given the accomplishments of Oppenheimer. Testimony of I.I. Rabi in U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, _In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer_ (GPO, 1954), on 468. The line "and we have a whole series of Super bombs" was censored in the public version and only released in 2015.

 * Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.
 * Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 * some poems that are in The Halfbreed Chronicles are addressed to people like Robert Oppenheimer. Nobody would ever look at him in a racial sense as a half-breed person, yet at the same time he was in a context and at a time, and made choices in his life, that for me apply the metaphor of half-breed to him.
 * Wendy Rose interview in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak by Laura Coltelli (1990)

 * it is impossible to form a sound judgment of Dr. Oppenheimer's situation without acquaintance with at least what the transcript tells us of the highly complicated context in which these charges were raised and explored...It is my guess that everyone around Dr. Oppenheimer has been much educated by Dr. Oppenheimer's experience. But so has Dr. Oppenheimer himself been educated, and not only by the experience of his own investigation but by his total political experience of recent years. There was a time, before Dr. Oppenheimer had come to understand the true nature of the Soviet Union, when surely it was the gravest of risks to trust him with secrets which the Soviet Union wanted so badly. But he never told those secrets then, and to have granted him clearance at that time only to take it away from him now, when at last he has learned the error of his way, seems to me at best to be tragic ineptitude. In effect, it constitutes a projection upon Dr. Oppenheimer of the punishment we perhaps owe to ourselves for having once been so careless with our nation's security.
 * Diana Trilling 1954 essay in Claremont Essays (1965)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Robert Oppenheimer


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Talk:Tadeusz Kościuszko

Is the quote in original spelling? Halibutt

 * I did not create this article, but worked on it, and my assumption has been that it was. ~ Kalki 13:29, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes it is. BTW, there's an entry in french, interesting I think: http://wikisource.org/wiki/Nieznany_rękopis_Tadeusza_Kościuszki (Unknown manuscript of T.K.). I don't know how to make a link to it.

Mysle ze to jest falszywy testament Kosciuszki.

Unsourced

 * First step to remove the chains of slavery is to have courage to be free, first step to victory is to discover own strength.
 * There is a time when you have to sacrifice everything to have everything saved.
 * I don’t want to fight only for nobles, I want freedom for whole my nation and only for it I will give away my life.
 * We need to incite love in our own country in those, who didn’t know that they have their motherland.

title: Talk:Tadeusz Kościuszko


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Bullshit

Bullshit (also bullcrap) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism BS. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive, although "bullshit" is more common. It is mostly a slang profanity term meaning "nonsense", especially in a rebuking response to communication or actions viewed as deceiving, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection or as many other parts of a speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings.

Quotes

 * The Democrats have to now decide whether they will continue defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit, partisan investigations, or whether they will apologize to the American people.
 * President Donald Trump, as quoted in Trump, in fiery first rally since Mueller vindication, calls on Dems to stop 'ridiculous bullsh--', Fox News

 * You know what? There's a jetstream of bullshit coming out of your mouth, my friend ...
 * Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm season 4 episode 4 The Weatherman  (2004) written Larry David

 * One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
 * Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005)

Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS. If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.
 * The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.
 * Emma González, in speech at Fort Lauderdale, Florida (17 February 2018), as quoted in "Florida student Emma Gonzalez to lawmakers and gun advocates: 'We call BS'", CNN (17 February 2018)

 * I need some fresh air, the stench of the bullshit is choking me.
 * Henno (Ross Kemp), Ultimate Force

 * When I went to Methodist youth fellowship, we were taught that the Catholics were all going to go to hell because they worship idols. So right there, I'm saying to myself, "Catholics are going to go to hell, but my aunt Molly married a Catholic and she converted and she's got 11 kids and they're all pretty nice and one of them's my good friend – they're all going to go to hell?" I'm thinking to myself, "This is bullshit." And if that's bullshit, how much of the rest of it is bullshit?
 * Stephen King Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview October 31, 2014)

 * Let the bullshit blow in the breeze.
 * Pharcyde, Labcabincalifornia (1995)

 * He has a BS in BS.
 * Lethal Weapon 4 (1998)

BULLLLLSHIT!!
 * Henry Rollins, Feast

 * Good luck walks and bullshit flies.
 * "Intermission", by the Scissor Sisters

 * Achoo! … Sorry, I'm allergic to bullshit.
 * Detective Spooner I, Robot (2004) written by Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman

 * Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B.S. too seriously, especially your own.
 * Robert Anton Wilson Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1993, 1996)

 * "Bullshit is a scientific term for information spread without concern for truth."
 * Dr. Diana Daly *

title: Bullshit


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Wikiquote:Transwiki/Famous political quotations

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. --Margaret Mead

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. --John Stuart Mill

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. --John Stuart Mill

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. --John Stuart Mill

I am not aware that any community has a right to force another to be civilized. --John Stuart Mill

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. --John Stuart Mill

One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. --John Stuart Mill

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. --John Stuart Mill

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. --John Stuart Mill

The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. --John Stuart Mill

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. --John Stuart Mill

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. --John Stuart Mill

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. --John Stuart Mill

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. --John Stuart Mill

What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs. --John Stuart Mill

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. --John Stuart Mill

The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship. -- Marcel Achard

Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed. Dean Acheson

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. -- Abigail Adams

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. -- Douglas Adams

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody. -- Franklin Pierce Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. -- Henry Brooks Adams

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. -- Henry Brooks Adams

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. -- John Adams

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John Adams, 1770

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. -- John Adams

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. -- John Quincy Adams

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. -- Samuel Adams

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds… -- Samuel Adams

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. -- Aesop

The Truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. -- Herbert Agar, A Time for Greatness

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. -- John F. Kennedy erroneously purporting to quote Dante Alighieri

There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault. -- Dante Alighieri

Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria. -- Eric Alterman

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other. -- Oscar Ameringer


text:
Wikiquote talk:Transwiki/Famous political quotations

Article from en:wikipedia, history as follows:

 * 15:02, 5 Sep 2004 Netoholic m
 * 15:01, 5 Sep 2004 Netoholic m
 * 20:56, 4 Sep 2004 Cohesion (move to wikiquote)
 * 15:46, 14 Jul 2004 Poccil m
 * 01:26, 14 Jul 2004 Robin Patterson (Starting to reduce a dead-end. Links need checking and more of them)
 * 00:47, 28 Jun 2004 Wile E. Heresiarch m (-vfd (consensus to transwiki to wikiquote))
 * 05:49, 18 Jun 2004 RickK (VfD)
 * 23:37, 21 May 2004 195.92.67.71 (removed quotation mark (") that was out of place, no other changes)
 * 16:03, 7 Apr 2004 158.121.123.194

-- Francs2000 12:18, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)


text:
User:Thoric

Please see my Wikipedia page. -Thoric

title: User:Thoric


text:
Soil

Soil (terra, dirt, and, as applicable, land and ground) is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. The Earth's body of soil is the pedosphere, which has four important functions: it is a medium for plant growth; it is a means of water storage, supply and purification; it is a modifier of Earth's atmosphere; it is a habitat for organisms; all of which, in turn, modify the soil.

Quotes

 * We are of the soil and the soil is of us.
 * Luther Standing Bear,

 * The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
 * Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977).

 * Es giebt ja in der ganzen Natur keinen wichtigeren, keinen der Betrachtung würdigeren Gegenstand und wenn ein berühmter Philosoph und Staatsmann der Vorzeit (Cic. de off. I. 42.) den Ackerbau für das würdigste Geschäft eines freien Bürgers erklärt, so muß es auch ein ebenso würdiges Geschäft für ihn sein, sich mit dem Boden bekannt zu machen, ohne welchen kein Ackerbau denkbar.
 * There is no more important object in nature, no object more worthy of contemplation, and if a famous philosopher and statesman of the past declares agriculture to be the worthy business of a free citizen (Cic. de off. I. 42.) it would also be an equally worthy business for him to get acquainted with the soil, without which agriculture is not conceivable.
 * Friedrich Albert Fallou (1862) Pedology or General and Special Soil Science Prospectus, Dresden 1862. . Translation by Google Translate
 * Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid adquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius.
 * 'For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture'
 * Cicero De officiis (On Dutiable Action). Book I, Section 42. Translation by Cyrus R. Edmonds (1873), p. 73

 * Worldwide, pharmaceutical use has been on the increase for the past century and will continue to increase into the future with the development of new medicines to cure recently discovered diseases as well as previously untreatable conditions. Following use by the patient, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and their metabolites are excreted to the sewerage system. They are then typically transported to a wastewater treatment works, where, depending on their molecular structure and physicochemical properties, they can be either degraded by biological treatment processes or released to the environment in effluents or sorb to sludge. The soil environment will therefore be exposed to APIs and their metabolites when sludge from treatment processes is applied to land as an agricultural fertilizer or when soil is irrigated with reclaimed wastewater effluent. While only a few studies have explored the occurrence of APIs in the soil environment, available data indicate that a range of API classes, including nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and antibacterial agents do occur in soils in concentrations up to the low mg/kg level. Because of detection of pharmaceuticals in soils, concerns have been raised over the potential for these substances to be taken up into human food items and to pose a risk to human health. A number of studies have demonstrated the uptake of pharmaceuticals used in human and veterinary medicine into plants. Studies have explored the uptake and translocation of a variety of APIs with a particular focus on the antidepressant drug fluoxetine and antibacterial chemicals including sulfamethazine, sulfamethoxazole, and trimethoprim into numerous plant species including root and shoot crops such as soybean, lettuce, and carrot.
 * Laura J. Carter, Eleanor Harris, Mike Williams, Jim J. Ryan, Rai S. Kookana, and Alistair B. A. Boxall, "Fate and Uptake of Pharmaceuticals in Soil–Plant Systems", J Agric Food Chem. 2014 Jan 29; 62(4): 816–825.

 * Man has only a thin layer of soil between himself and starvation.
 * Bard of Cincinnati; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

 * There is no such thing as a dead soil The decomposition of organic matter in soil is a physiological process associated with the life activities of innumerable microscopic soil inhabitants.
 * Dmitri Ivanovsky June 1972, Bacteriological Reviews, Vol. 36 p. 135-145 NCBI

 * We are able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating to maintain a liveable environment, but we tend to take nature's services for granted because we don't pay money for most of them.
 * Eugene Odum (1975) A Bridge Between Science and Society as cited in: Edward Goldsmith (2002) "Ecology – a bridge"

 * The fate of the soil system depends on society's willingness to intervene in the market place, and to forego some of the short-term benefits that accrue from 'mining' the soil so that soil quality and fertility can be maintained over the longer term.
 * Eugene Odum (1993) Ecology and our endangered life-support systems. p. 143

 * The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
 * Franklin D. Roosevelt, Letter to all State Governors on a Uniform Soil Conservation Law (26 February 1937)

 * We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.
 * Adlai Stevenson, Speech to the UN Economic and Social Council, Geneva, Switzerland (9 July 1965).

 * To increase materially the productivity of the soil, it must be more effectively fertilized by artificial means. The question of food-production resolves itself, then, into the question how best to fertilize the soil. What it is that made the soil is still a mystery.  To explain its origin is probably equivalent to explaining the origin of life itself.  The rocks, disintegrated by moisture and heat and wind and weather, were in themselves not capable of maintaining life. Some unexplained condition arose, and some new principle came into effect, and the first layer capable of sustaining low organisms, like mosses was formed.  These, by their life and death, added more of the life sustaining quality to the soil, and higher organisms could then subsist, and so on and on, until at last highly developed plant and animal life could flourish.  But though the theories are, even now, not in agreement as to how fertilization is effected, it is a fact, only too well ascertained, that the soil cannot indefinitely sustain life, and some way must be found to supply it with the substances which have been abstracted from it by the plants.  The chief and most valuable among these substances are compounds of nitrogen, and the cheap production of these is, therefore, the key for the solution of the all-important food problem.  Our atmosphere contains an inexhaustible amount of nitrogen, and could we but oxidize it and produce these compounds, an incalculable benefit for mankind would follow. Long ago this idea took a powerful hold on the imagination of scientific men, but an efficient means for accomplishing this result could not be devised.  The problem was rendered extremely difficult by the extraordinary inertness of the nitrogen, which refuses to combine even with oxygen.  But here electricity comes to our aid: the dormant affinities of the element are awakened by an electric current of the proper quality.  As a lump of coal which has been in contact with oxygen for centuries without burning will combine with it when once ignited, so nitrogen, excited by electricity, will burn.
 * Nikola Tesla, "The Problem With Increasing Human Energy: With Special References To the Harnessing Of The Sun's Energy", Century Illustrated Magazine, (June 1900).

 * One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil.
 * Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 54. Also in

title: Soil


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Talk:Soil

Will copy list from wikipedia soil article to here, figure out how to do what I want to do. Paleorthid 18:02, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Theme template
 * "Quote1." ~ Author

 * "Quote2." ~ Author

 * "Quote3." ~ Name of Book or Play by Author

 (this puts a set of useful links at the bottom of a page, based on the "lynx" template.)

Unsourced

 * “We all should fall upon our knees and sing out praise for manganese.” ~ Richmond Bartlett

 * “I saw all the people hustling early in the morning to go into the factories and the stores and the office buildings, to do their job, to get their check. But ultimately it's not office buildings or jobs that give us our checks. It's the soil. The soil is what gives us the real income that supports us all” ~ Ed Begley, Jr.

 * “History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.” ~ Hugh H. Bennett and W.C. Lowdermilk, circa 1930s

 * “... if this is to be a permanent nation we must save this most indispensable of all our God-given assets -- the soil, from which comes our food and raiment. If we fail in this, remember that much sooner than we have expected this will be a nation of subsoil farmers.” ~ Hugh H. Bennett (1933)

 * “Soil erosion is as old as agriculture. It began when the first heavy rain struck the first furrow turned by a crude implement of tillage in the hands or prehistoric man. It has been going on ever since, wherever man's culture of the earth has bared the soil to rain and wind.” ~ Hugh H. Bennett and W.C. Lowdermilk, circa 1930s

 * “The plain truth is that Americans, as a people, have never learned to love the land and to regard it as an enduring resource.” ~ Soil Conservation by Hugh H. Bennett

 * “There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place” ~ Francis Bacon Sr.

 * “The richest soil, if cultivated, produces the rankest weeds” ~ Plutarch

 * “... the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit.” ~ The Unsettling of America (1977) by Wendell Berry

 * “...soil is alive and is composed of living and nonliving components, having many interactions. It is a part of the larger unit, the terrestrial ecosystem, that soil must be studied and conserved....we must remember that the biota have been involved in [the soil system=s] creation, as well as adapting to life within it.” ~ (1996) D.C. Coleman and D. A. Crossley, Jr.

 * “We might say that the earth has the spirit of growth; that its flesh is the soil.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
 * “We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

 * “The thin layer of soil covering the earth's surface represents the difference between survival and extinction for most terrestrial life.” ~ Defining and Assessing Soil Quality by John W. Doran and Timothy B. Parkin

 * “... the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil.” ~ Dr. Daniel Hillel

 * “Detachment has bred ignorance and out of ignorance comes the delusion that our civilisation has risen above nature and has set itself free of its constraints.” ~ Dr. Daniel Hillel (2004)
 * “I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf ... than be king of all these dead and destroyed.” ~ Odyssey by Homer

 * “It is not a coincidence the best farm soils in North America are in the same approximate locale as our most replete and consumptive metropolises.” ~ Justin Isherwood

 * “One of the great treasures of the world is to be found in the vast prairie soil covering parts of seven Midwest states together with a moderate climate and ample rainfall. Subtract these Midwest soils from the American experience and replace them with the drought-prone soils, and the course of our destiny and wealth might have been otherwise.” ~ Justin Isherwood

 * “Plowed ground smells of earthworms and empires.” ~ Justin Isherwood

 * “Soil is the last necessary thing. With air and water, a person can live 30 days; add but a comely pile of dirt and life expectancy expands a thousand times.” ~ Justin Isherwood

 * “The decline and abandonment of the family farm is the direct result of stripping soil of any identity and ethical or strategic value.” ~ Justin Isherwood

 * “While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.” ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) quoted in the Des Moines Register, July 8, 1979

 * “ . . . (although) not an organism that can multiply, soil on the Earth is a living system.” ~ The Soil Resource by Hans Jenny

 * “Each soil is an individual body of nature, possessing its own character, life history, and powers to support plants and animals.” ~ Meeting the Expectations of the Land by Hans Jenny

 * “Soil isn't a granular medium suffused with chemicals, it is alive and must be alive to function.” ~ Gary Jones (2005)

 * “Essentially, all life depends upon the soil ... There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together.” ~ USDA Yearbook of Agriculture (1938) by Charles E. Kellogg

 * “Civilization has its roots in the soil.” ~ Charles E. Kellogg

 * “Dirt's a lot more fun when you add water!” ~ Dennis The Menace (2004) by Hank Ketcham

 * “Nature is perverse. Especially soils.” ~ D. Kirkham

 * “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” ~ A Sand County Almanac (1949) by Aldo Leopold

 * “Where the bottom layer of the sky rubs up against the top horizon of the soil, all terrestrial life is found.” ~ Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan

 * “...which no one knows very much about. We don't even know the etymology of the word.” ~ Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan

 * “A soil is not a pile of dirt. It is a transformer, a body that organizes raw materials into tissue. These are the tissues that become the mother to all organic life.” ~ Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan

 * “How can I stand on the ground every day and not feel its power? How can I live my life stepping on this stuff and not wonder at it?”  ~ Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan

 * “Our motive for protecting the soil is our certainty that it is fragile. It does not have the same unchanging character as a mountain or a river; it is a recent and ephemeral product. We owe it our lives and our energy, and the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.” ~ Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth by William Bryant Logan

 * “Probably more harm has been done to the science by the almost universal attempts to look upon the soil merely as a producer of crops rather than as a natural body worth in and for itself of all the study that can be devoted to it, than most men realize.” ~ C. F. Marbut, 1920.

 * “The soil itself must be the object of observation and experiment and the facts obtained must be soil facts before they can be incorporated into soil science. The science of zoology was developed through the study of animals, that of botany through the study of plants, and soil science must be developed through the study of the soil.” ~ C. F. Marbut, 1920.

 * “...only rarely have we stood back and celebrated our soils as something beautiful and perhaps even mysterious. For what other natural body, worldwide in its distribution, has so many interesting secrets to reveal to the patient observer” ~ Les Molloy
 * “Tilth is something every farmer can recognize but no scientist can measure.” ~ Walter Russell

 * “Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber” ~ Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau

 * “. . . like any other reservoir this one too can be drained and left empty and useless; let but the winds and the rains strike at the fallowed fields; let but the naked soil be exposed to the elements - how soon and how tragic the loss.” ~ Our Soil and Water by J. A. Toogood

 * “This soil of ours, this precious heritage, what an unobtrusive existence it leads!...To the rich soil let us give the credit due. The soil is the reservoir of life.” ~ Our Soil and Water by J. A. Toogood
 * “People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.” Henry Wallace

 * “I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love; If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.” Walt Whitman

 * “For all things come from earth, and all things end by becoming earth.” ~ Xenophanes, (580 B.C.)
 * “To be a successful farmer one must first know the nature of the soil.” ~ Oeconomicus (400 B.C.) by Xenophon

title: Talk:Soil


text:
Bill Bryson

William "Bill" McGuire Bryson, OBE (born December 8, 1951) is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on scientific subjects.

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

 * I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
 * Opening line.

 * When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.

 * My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

 * I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.

 * I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

 * I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material.

 * Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.

 * A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)

 * I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.

 * For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
 * about Newport, Rhode Island (RI)

Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)

 * Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.

 * We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

 * The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

 * Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz

 * I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.

 * We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under.

Notes from a Small Island (1995)

 * Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.
 * Bill Bryson was later awarded an honorary doctorate and appointed to the position of Chancellor of the University of Durham.

 * Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid.

 * I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, "Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!" Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

A Walk in the Woods (1997)

 * All page numbers are from the first trade paperback edition, published by Broadway Books ISBN 978-0-7679-0252-6 in 1999

 * I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.
 * Chapter 4 (p. 51)

 * If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.
 * Chapter 6 (p. 81)

 * The Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting—certainly the most striking—example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal—the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America’s national parks this century.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 92)

 * In the Smokies, over 90 percent of Fraser firs—a noble tree, unique to the southern Appalachian highlands—are sick or dying, from a combination of acid rain and the depredations of a moth called the balsam woolly adelgid. Ask a park official what they are doing about it and he will say, “We are monitoring the situation closely.” For this, read: “We are watching them die.”
 * Chapter 7 (p. 93)

 * Let’s not lose our perspective here. The Smokies achieved their natural splendor without the guidance of a national park service and don’t actually need it now.
 * Chapter 7 (p. 94)

 * Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 106)

 * I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.
 * Chapter 8 (pp. 107-108)

 * “Virginia?” he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis.
 * Chapter 8 (p. 108)

 * Now here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American does in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.
 * Chapter 11 (p. 128)

 * Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. (long list of character deficiencies elided)... His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed.
 * Chapter 13 (p. 171)

 * “Tell me, did they specify ’asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?“
 * Chapter 14 (p. 187)

 * The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.
 * Chapter 15 (p. 198)

 * America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.
 * Chapter 18 (p. 234)

I'm a Stranger Here Myself (US) / Notes From a Big Country (UK) (1998)

 * For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that 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. They are, in short, a perfect match.

 * By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.

 * America is an outstandingly dangerous place. Consider this: every year in New Hampshire a dozen or more people are killed crashing their cars into moose. Now correct me if I am wrong, but this is not something that is likely to happen to you on the way home from Sainsbury's.

 * Three things alone are certain when you venture into a loft: that you will crack your head on a beam at least twice, that you will get cobwebs draped over your face, and that you will not find what you went looking for.

 * Normally, your wife can hear things that no one else on earth can hear. She can hear a dab of jam fall onto a carpet two rooms away. She can hear spilled coffee being furtively mopped up with a good bathtowel. She can hear dirt being tracked across a clean floor. She can hear you just thinking about doing something you shouldn't do. But get yourself stuck in a loft hatch and suddenly it is as if she has been placed in a soundproof chamber.

 * My wife [...] recently put me on a diet after suggesting (a little unkindly, if you ask me), that I was beginning to look like something Richard Branson would try to get airborne.

 * [I relaxed] my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put "Ph.D." after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all — and not just because I don't have one).
 * Bryson was later awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Durham

 * According to an opinion poll, 13 per cent of women in the United States cannot say whether they wear their tights under their knickers or over them. That's something like 12 million women walking around in a state of chronic foundation garment uncertainty. Perhaps because I so seldom wear ladies' clothing I don't fully appreciate the challenge involved, but I am almost certain that if I did wear tights with knickers I would know which was on top. More to the point, if a stranger with a clipboard came up to me in the street and asked me how my underwear was configured, I don't believe I would tell him that I didn't know.

 * There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

 * It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.

In a Sunburned Country (US) / Down Under (UK) (2000)

 * Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

 * After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.

 * It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.

 * Above all, what is oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there.

 * So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched these poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn't see them anymore.

 * It was impossible to determine what he was saying, but I imagined he was telling all those present that they were nongs and maggots. I decided I quite liked watching the news with the sound off.

 * "I'd turn on the lights, but they're blown. I'd offer you a seat, but there isn't one. I'd offer you a drink from the minibar, but there doesn't appear to be one." "It certainly is basic." "Basic? It's a bloody cell!"

 * The Opera House is a splendid edifice, and I wish to take nothing away from it, but my heart belongs to the Harbour Bridge. It's not as festive, but it is far more dominant – you can see it from every corner of the city, creeping into frame from the oddest angles, like an uncle who wants to get into every snapshot. From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-storey building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the six-million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs 30,000 tons. This is a great bridge.
 * Pages 80-81

Interview with Stanford's Newsletter (June 2001)
Online text

 * There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said "he had always wanted to be generous to a fault".

 * I really was more intent on getting out of Iowa than everybody else. I just felt I didn't quite fit in exactly, the way other people did. Then I came here and discovered by living in Britain that being a foreigner is really a treat. It is such a great position to be in. When things are going well you can step forward and take part in the ceremonies and everything is great. And when things are not going well, being entirely hypothetical here, if for example your national football team got beat by Germany, you can stand back and say what a shame.

 * I had also got used to the idea that here [in the UK] you can make quips all the time and in America that can be very dangerous. I wrote about it in one of the books. Once I was going through customs and immigration in Boston, and the guy said as I went past "Any fruit or vegetables?" and I said "OK, I'll have four pounds of potatoes if they are fresh" and it was like he was going to take me off and pin me to the floor.

 * Well, I didn't ever think about Australia much. To me Australia had never been very interesting, it was just something that happened in the background. It was Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee movies and things that never really registered with me and I didn't pay any attention to it at all. I went out there in 1992, as I was invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I got there and realised almost immediately that this was a really really interesting country and I knew absolutely nothing about it. As I say in the book, the thing that really struck me was that they had this prime minister who disappeared in 1967, Harold Holt and I had never heard about this. I should perhaps tell you because a lot of other people haven't either. In 1967 Harold Holt was prime minister and he was walking along a beach in Victoria just before Christmas and decided impulsively to go for a swim and dove into the water and swam about 100 feet out and vanished underneath the waves, presumably pulled under by the ferocious undertow or rips as they are called, that are a feature of so much of the Australian coastline. In any case, his body was never found. Two things about that amazed me. The first is that a country could just lose a prime minister — that struck me as a really quite special thing to do — and the second was that I had never heard of this. I could not recall ever having heard of this. I was sixteen years old in 1967. I should have known about it and I just realised that there were all these things about Australia that I had never heard about that were actually very very interesting. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it is a fascinating place. The thing that really endeared Australia to me about Harold Holt's disappearance was not his tragic drowning, but when I learned that about a year after he disappeared the City of Melbourne, his home town, decided to commemorate him in some appropriate way and named a municipal swimming pool after him. I just thought: this is a great country.
 * The pool was under construction before he disappeared and is located in the electorate he represented.

 * I went round to all these minority sports and I couldn't really appreciate them. Fencing, for example, is just "click, click, click" and it is over. Then they retire. Then they go again "On guard — click, click, click" and it is over again. You just think, "what is this sport?" I thought this is really boring and then I went to Judo and it was just the same thing. These two guys just endlessly circling each other, acting as if what they are trying to do is take the others shirt off without him realising this is what they are trying to do. I just thought "what is this? I don't understand this at all". Then I went to table tennis, which obviously I could identify with because I had played it myself — not quite at Olympic standard — but I could understand it. It suddenly became clear to me that these people really are so far beyond anything I could ever dream of becoming. I felt really terrible because I hadn't appreciated the fencers. The reason I couldn't follow them was because they were so damn good. Their hands were so quick that I couldn't see what was going on.

 * … I had some suggestions [about fencing]. I thought that you could encourage surprise attacks. I thought that would be very good. I kind of liked the idea of arming one guy with a conventional sword but giving the other a pikestaff. My favourite was the idea of blindfolding one of the competitors or blindfolding them both and spinning them around a bit so they were a little bit unstable and then just pushing them towards each other. It would make each match go on a bit longer.

 * A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a family from Korea. We weren't sure whether they were from North Korea or South Korea.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

 * It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.
 * Pages 1-2

 * Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.
 * Page 3

 * All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
 * On the moment of creation; page 10

 * As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: "In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time." To which adds Guth: "Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts."
 * On the Big Bang

 * 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.
 * Page 53

 * Despite declining catches, New England fishermen continue to receive state and federal tax incentives that encourage them — in some cases all but compel them — to acquire bigger boats and to harvest the seas more intensively. Today the fishermen of Massachusetts are reduced to fishing the hideous hagfish, for which there is a slight market in the Far East, but even their numbers are now falling.
 * Page 285

 * It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity — in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes — an interesting side branch.
 * Page 311

 * 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.
 * Page 336

 * 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.
 * Page 380

 * Absolute brain size does not tell you everything — or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
 * Pages 446-447, footnote

Bill Bryson: The accidental chancellor (November 15, 2005)
John Crace, The Guardian

 * ...Our guide announces that he's going to take us to the coldest place on Earth, where particles are cooled to within a fraction of a Kelvin. "Ah," says Bryson. "That must be Donald Rumsfeld's heart."

 * One of my duties, this week, is to open the new Ustinov college," he confesses, "and while I'm delighted that Durham should honour its former chancellor this way — and I sincerely hope it continues this tradition for me — I can't help feeling that an American university would only have done so had the chancellor also handed over a substantial amount of dosh.

 * They [the American authorities] can't actually believe that anyone would want to not be an American," he says. "It's not enough to send them a letter and tell them you've become British; you've got to go to the embassy to formally renounce your US citizenship. I'm a little worried that when I do this they'll pack me off to Guantanamo.

 * It would be lovely to think I had become a genius," he smiles, "but the fact is that I've forgotten most of it. Occasionally I can be watching University Challenge and a stray fact emerges from the recesses of my subconscious that I didn't know I knew, but for the most part I'm as vague on the details as I ever was.

The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006)

 * The makers of sneakers also thoughtfully pocked the soles with numberless crevices, craters, chevrons, mazes, crop circles, and other rubbery hieroglyphs, so that when you stepped in a moist pile of dog shit, as you most assuredly did within three bounds of leaving the house, they provided additional absorbing hours of pastime while you cleaned them out with a stick, gagging quietly but oddly content.
 * p. 34

 * I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy- five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.
 * p. 36

 * On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as “dishevelled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires—five in all. That’s how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day.
 * p. 62

 * He hit the water—impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently.
 * p. 78

 * Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable... But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string. Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.
 * p. 81

 * I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Moines. But evidently they all took the matter seriously, for even the teacher, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing, was inserted under her desk, too—or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40 percent. Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing.
 * p. 117

 * And then suddenly I would realize that I couldn’t remember, hadn’t actually consciously experienced, any of the last forty-seven properties I had visited, and didn’t know if I had left a paper or just walked up to the door, stood for a moment like an underfunctioning automaton, and turned around and walked away again. It is not easy to describe the sense of self-disappointment that comes with reaching the end of your route and finding that there are sixteen undelivered papers in your bag and you don’t have the least idea—not the least idea—to whom they should have gone. I spent much of my prepubescent years first walking an enormous newspaper route, then revisiting large parts of it. Sometimes twice.
 * p. 122

 * So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin.Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss. Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen.
 * p. 140

 * In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.
 * p. 170

 * "Wow, look at all the places you can park,” he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey. For about a year the most dangerous place to drive in Des Moines was the parking lot of Merle Hay Mall because of all the cars speeding at joyous random angles across its boundless blacktop without reflecting that other happy souls might be doing likewise.
 * p. 182

 * Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
 * p. 193

The Body (2006)

 * Your brain is marvellously efficient. It requires only about 400 calories of energy a day — about the same as you get in a blueberry muffin. Try running your laptop for 24 hours on a muffin and see how far you get.
 * Promotional advert

title: Bill Bryson


text:
User:Paleorthid

Paleorthid

title: User:Paleorthid


text:
Thomas Hutchinson (governor)

Thomas Hutchinson (September 9, 1711 – June 3, 1780) was a businessman, historian, and a prominent Loyalist politician of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years before the American Revolution. A successful merchant and politician, Hutchinson was active at high levels of the Massachusetts government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who, despite initial opposition to Parliamentary tax laws directed at the colonies, came to be identified by John Adams and Samuel Adams as a proponent of hated British taxes.

Quotes

 * I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from a state of nature to the most perfect state of government, there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.
 * Letter 20 January 1769, as printed in James Kendall Hosmer, The Life of Thomas Hutchinson (1896), Appendix C

title: Thomas Hutchinson (governor)