Top 40 Simon Winchester Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you’ve published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, ‘Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.’”

— Simon Winchester

2. “The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned from the event – not least something as profound as the theory of plate tectonics – then it somehow puts the ruination into a much more positive light.”

— Simon Winchester

3. “These were the soldiers of the Second Brigade – the Irish Brigade – and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Federal army. “When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted,” as one English war correspondent wrote, “the Irish Brigade was called upon.” The.”

— Simon Winchester

4. “Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.”

— Simon Winchester

5. “We associate the North Atlantic with cod. The motto of Newfoundland used to be ‘In cod we trust.’ It was a joke, but it was essentially true. But there is no cod anymore. And that’s extraordinary. It’s all because of either greed or politics – Canadian politics.”

— Simon Winchester

6. “Without haste, without fear, we conquer the world.”

— Simon Winchester

7. “Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays – they are all in this one book.”

— Simon Winchester

8. “The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today – Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia – even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.”

— Simon Winchester

9. “Nothing is eternally stable, and even Kansas isn’t really in Kansas anymore. The earth is in a constant state of flux.”

— Simon Winchester

10. “The English language was spoken and written – but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air – it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were – who knew?”

— Simon Winchester

11. “His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone’s eyes.”

— Simon Winchester

12. “I find the science behind major natural events almost more interesting than the way in which those same events wreak their effects on human society.”

— Simon Winchester

13. “The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.”

— Simon Winchester

14. “The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands’ lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves.”

— Simon Winchester

15. “No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses. And.”

— Simon Winchester

16. “My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn’t give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing to be interested in. I’m just not particularly interested in pop culture. I think I am more interested in things that have a settled permanence about them.”

— Simon Winchester

17. “In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings – then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.”

— Simon Winchester

18. “I don’t hero worship for the sake of hero worship. When I find people who are truly remarkable – and I think Joseph Needham is a classic example – I do value their counsel.”

— Simon Winchester

19. “He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell.”

— Simon Winchester

20. “Why do we as a people choose to live in beautiful and risky places? Beautiful places are relatively dangerous; the forces that made them beautiful are the same forces that will ultimately destroy them.”

— Simon Winchester

21. “And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.” But.”

— Simon Winchester

22. “The most difficult task for anyone wandering through a foreign land with the hope of gaining some insight into it is the profound need to come to terms with the lives and thoughts of strangers.”

— Simon Winchester

23. “God – who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman – naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;.”

— Simon Winchester

24. “We kid ourselves that we’re trying to be empathetic with the human condition from a distance, but I don’t think that is it at all. It’s stupid; it’s a waste of time. But when the earth flexes its muscles, that’s rather different. That’s a powerful reminder of where we are.”

— Simon Winchester

25. “But those who initially went to the West were overtaken by the barbarism of the frontier with astonishing speed – think Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. There was murder, mayhem, robbery, alcoholism, depression, and suicide, and all of it on a positively Homeric scale that still has cultural anthropologists enraptured.”

— Simon Winchester

26. “Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though.”

— Simon Winchester

27. “We should all live in central or southwest Queensland in Australia, which is geologically stable. Or Kansas or Nebraska, because it’s relatively geologically stable. I am sure there is no emergency plan for Topeka.”

— Simon Winchester

28. “Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived.”

— Simon Winchester

29. “Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to ‘fix our language forever’ – no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.”

— Simon Winchester

30. “Having been in the newspaper business for a long, long time, I often wonder, Why do we actually need to know about something like a bus crash in Bangladesh that has no effect on us at all? That can be nothing other than voyeurism.”

— Simon Winchester

31. “There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.”

— Simon Winchester

32. “I’ve come to accept who my readers turn out to be, rather than having some sort of demographic target.”

— Simon Winchester

33. “One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. “No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers,” he replied, archly. “I find, however, that you have been looking for them.”

— Simon Winchester

34. “I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, ‘Wait, I was there.’ That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.”

— Simon Winchester

35. “Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.”

— Simon Winchester

36. “I think they will never really enjoy true democracy in China.”

— Simon Winchester

37. “Millions upon millions of people came here full of hope and aspiration to this extraordinary land of liberty and opportunity, and helped build the United States. So the Atlantic Ocean was absolutely critical to the story of America.”

— Simon Winchester

38. “The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.”

— Simon Winchester

39. “The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which – together with two Canadian provinces – contribute waters to its flow.”

— Simon Winchester

40. “2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.”

— Simon Winchester

41. “But to all of this the land itself remain sturdily indifferent and unmoved, the human behavior played out on its surfaces merely trivia. Except, of course, where human behavior induces changes to the ferocity of the weather and the levels of the sea, and land may then fall victim to the climate, and has to alter its shape and size as a result.”

— Simon Winchester

42. “To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.”

— Simon Winchester

43. “No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”

— Simon Winchester

44. “While a mere one million people had arrived in America in the seventy years between independence and 1840, over the following sixty years no fewer than thirty million came flooding in – most of them northern Europeans, particularly Britons and Irish, in the years of the first great wave that lasted until 1890;.”

— Simon Winchester

45. “In Japan it is more: precision in all things – not least in everyday railway services of such legendary punctuality that an apology had to be offered late in 2017 when an express left twenty seconds early – can be thought of as part of the national religion.”

— Simon Winchester

46. “The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at least it’s great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.”

— Simon Winchester

47. “They are clean to the far more brutally restrictive demands of ISO number 1, which permits only 10 particles of just one-tenth of a micron per cubic meter, and no particles of any size larger than that. A human being existing in a normal environment swims in a miasma of air and vapor that is five million times less clean.”

— Simon Winchester

48. “Perhaps we should not be as surprised as the visitor to the American West in the middle of the century who remarked that “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.”

— Simon Winchester

49. “One in a hundred people today suffer from schizophrenia: Nearly all of them, if treated with compassion and good chemistry, can have some kind of dignified life, of a kind that was denied, for much of his time, to Doctor Minor. Except, of course, that Minor had hid dictionary work.”

— Simon Winchester