Portal:Geography/Selected quote/1
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What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/2
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The vast material resources of Oregon furnish a solid and enduring basis for the spirit of enterprise that animates our people, and for that wonderful superstructure of vigorous and thrifty statehood which we are rearing here on this western shore of the continent.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/3
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When the bones of prehistoric animals began to be discovered and scrutinized in the nineteenth century, there were those who said that the fossils had been placed in the rock by god, in order to test our faith. This cannot be disproved. Nor can my own pet theory that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/4
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History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/5
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Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/6
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I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/7
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A boundless continent, Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of night Starless expos'd.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/8
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How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/9
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That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, / Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,— / Are but the solemn decorations all / Of the great tomb of man.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/10
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Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; / Man marks the earth with ruin—his control / Stops with the shore.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/11
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Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/12
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The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains - their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/13
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Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/14
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You will perceive the gist of the question is not whether the mountain should be called Mount Everest or by its true native name (which is a principle not disputed by any one), but whether it can be called Deodanga without risk of error, in the absence of satisfactory proof that this is really its native name.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/15
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Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/16
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A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/17
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I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/18
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The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/19
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Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/20
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I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, more or less different in the successive chapters, may represent the forms of life, which are entombed in our consecutive formations, and which falsely appear to have been abruptly introduced. On this view, the difficulties above discussed are greatly diminished, or even disappear.
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Portal:Geography/Selected quote/21
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Archaeology is the nearest history comes to shopping.
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