The nature of catastrophe is, after all, reasonably unvarying in the way it ruins, destroys, wounds and devastates. But if something can be learned f…

- Simon Winchester

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

All of those broken bones in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes prompt us to remember what in calmer times we are invar…

- Simon Winchester

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 ar…

- Simon Winchester

Millions upon millions of people came here full of hope and aspiration to this extraordinary land of liberty and opportunity, and helped build the Un…

- Simon Winchester

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 the…

- Simon Winchester

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, i…

- Simon Winchester

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 Bang…

- Simon Winchester

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…

- Simon Winchester