Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence. Don't you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
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. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way? (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
Strange as it may seem,? wrote Richard Feynman, ?we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone cacll from the frankly interesting. (Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything")