25 quotes
The creation of any sense of unity among a population of potentially disharmonious settlers almost always requires the deliberate agency of man.
The Men who United the States (2013)
“I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
The Men who United the States (2013)
The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.
Land (2021)
An end to timidity—the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book.
The Meaning of Everything (2003)
Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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.
The Men who United the States (2013)
One nation has been fond of seizing what another was tired of possessing; and it will be difficult to point out the country which is to this day in the hands of its first inhabitants.
Land (2021)
In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
With the world’s sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that can’t fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false.
Land (2021)
The death throes of Krakatoa lasted for exactly twenty hours and fifty-six minutes, culminating in the gigantic explosion that all observers now agree happened at 10:02 A.M. on Monday, August 27, 1883.
Krakatoa (2003)
“I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
The eruption of Krakatoa was, indeed, the first true catastrophe in the world to take place after the establishment of a worldwide network of telegraph cables—a network that allowed news of disaster to be flashed around the planet in double-quick time.
Krakatoa (2003)
“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.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)