The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.
18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.
A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.
Traveling is more fun – hell, life is more fun – if you can treat it as a series of impulses.
My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they’ve left me.
The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.
Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.
I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before.
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.
English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
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.