Extra Life Quotes

“That is often how new ideas come into the world: someone perceives a signal where others would instinctively perceive noise.”
― Steven Johnson, Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

“But by the 1840s, more than half of all deaths in New York were infants and young children. Something in the city was indeed “slaughtering the innocents,” as Leslie put it—and seemingly at an accelerating rate. Some of those deaths were attributable to waterborne disease, particularly cholera, concentrated in terrible epidemics that laid siege to the city in 1832 and 1849. But in other years, the primary killer appears to have been contaminated milk. And while its victims were overwhelmingly children, many adults were numbered among the death toll as well. In 1850, after laying the cornerstone for the Washington Monument, the twelfth president of the United States, Zachary Taylor, died in office after drinking what many believe was a contaminated glass of milk.”
― Steven Johnson, Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

“Facts, however numerous, do not constitute a science. Like innumerable grains of sand on the sea shore, single facts appear isolated, useless, shapeless; it is only when compared, when arranged in their natural relations, when crystallized by the intellect, that they constitute the eternal truths of science.”
― Steven Johnson, Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer