“So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.”

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.

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.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

In order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.

I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

Although a few antibiotics have been toughened up a bit, the pharmaceutical industry hasn’t given us an entirely new antibiotic since the 1970s.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

I don’t care what kind it is, just get me a beer.

My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.

Beer may cause you to digress and lead a happier life.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.