Marko Jevtić > Marko's Quotes

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
― Margaret Fuller

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“In reality, 100 million drivers never sat in a 12-hour planning meeting together, nor do they report to the same boss; but they are able to navigate the nation's highways with less chaos than most 50-person departments. The next time you attend a meeting, note how much of the conversation focuses on the "what" versus the "how.”
― Jamie Flinchbaugh, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road

“Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“A physicist is the atoms’ way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrödinger offered a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat was placed in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism that would break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100 per cent alive and 100 per cent dead at the same time.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“a Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho for short.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke36 about a posteriori conclusions – reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. ‘You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,’ he would say. ‘I saw a car with the licence plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of licence plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!’ His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It is a 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.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them – at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day comes that the virus mutates its way around this, we may be in real trouble.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that ‘once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38’. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favour the north sides of trees (‘The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark’) he really meant lichens, for in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren’t distinguished. True mosses aren’t actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had been briefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who had been a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar, accounts of what exactly transpired vary widely. In the most popular version, Wilberforce, when properly in flow, turned to Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whether he claimed attachment to the apes by way of his grandmother or grandfather.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large,’ says Tattersall. Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only 2 per cent of the body’s mass, but devour 20 per cent of its energy42. They are also comparatively picky in what they use as fuel. If you never ate another morsel of fat, your brain would not complain because it won’t touch the stuff. It wants glucose instead, and lots of it, even if it means short-changing other organs.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If you follow the mitochondrial DNA backwards, it will take you to a certain place – to an Ursula or Tara or whatever. But if you take any other bit of DNA, any gene at all, and trace it back, it will take you someplace else altogether.’ It was a little, I gathered, like following a road randomly out of London and finding that eventually it ends at John O’Groats, and concluding from this that anyone in London must therefore have come from the north of Scotland.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here – and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we have only just begun to grasp.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when travelling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adulthood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and with a sense that all the world beyond this snug perimeter offers nothing but danger or indifference.”
― Bill Bryson, Bill Bryson's African Diary

“Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.”
― Bill Bryson, Bill Bryson's African Diary

“We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank – micro-finance institution is the formal term – that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.”
― Bill Bryson, Bill Bryson's African Diary

“An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with ‘h’: hour, honest, honour and heir.”
― Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words

“As a rough rule, I would suggest that a company’s orthographic eccentricities should be noted, possibly even observed, but never overindulged. Just because a company chooses to put a backward letter into its title or to spell its name in small capitals does not entitle it to become a distraction in print.”
― Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words

“activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: ‘The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region’ (Independent). Just make it ‘a week of earthquakes’.”
― Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words

“acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers to those that come to a sudden crisis and require immediate attention. People in the Third World may suffer from a chronic shortage of food. In a bad year, their plight may become acute.”
― Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words