“The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

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.

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.

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.

It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Over the past 20 years the drug companies, with their enormous wealth, have taken medicine over and now control its research, what is taught and the information released to the public

I feel there’s an existential angst among young people. I didn’t have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.