Down Under Bill Bryson Quotes

#1. Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.

Bill Bryson

#2. The distance from the surface of Earth to the middle is 6,370 kilometres, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the centre and dropped a brick down it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom

Bill Bryson

#3. To the Christian death is the exchanging of a tent for a building.

Billy Graham

#4. It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At

Bill Bryson

#5. We often talk to ourselves in ways that we would never let a stranger or even a friend talk to us.

John Spence

#6. When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world.

Bill Bryson

#7. Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction
they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

William Hazlitt

#8. The greater koa finch, an innocuous member of the honeycreeper family, lurked shyly in the canopies of koa trees, but if someone imitated its song it would abandon its cover at once and fly down in a show of welcome.

Bill Bryson

#9. And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

Henry David Thoreau

#10. If there is something to win and nothing to lose from asking a question then ask whatever it takes

W. Clement Stone

#11. Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths.

Bill Bryson

#12. Running for money doesn't make you run fast. It makes you run first.

Ben Jipcho

#13. It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

Bill Bryson

#14. There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

Bill Bryson

#15. And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains ...

Bill Bryson

#16. I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.

Bill Bryson

#17. And yet, you do not throw out some of the great minds of the Church - and people in Church history - and say they have no credibility because they committed a sin or made a mistake.

Walter Martin