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Tom Standage QUOTES

Tom Standage QUOTES

1 " Illness and death are not the only consequences of the lack of access to water; it also hinders education and economic development. Widespread illness makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the United Nations, one of the main reasons girls do not go to school in sub-Saharan Africa is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells and carrying it home. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

2 " During the first millennium BCE, even the beer-loving Mesopotamians turned their backs on beer, which was dethroned as the most cultured and civilized of drinks, and the age of wine began. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

3 " But [Coca-Cola] was also genuinely welcomed by the servicemen in far-flung military bases: Coca-Cola reminded them of home and helped to maintain morale. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

4 " Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee's popularity grew after the duty on imports was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished again in 1872. "

― Tom Standage

5 " Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora at a time. Wine displaced beer to become the most civilized and sophisticated of drinks—a status it has maintained ever since, thanks to its association with the intellectual achievements of Ancient Greece. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

6 " This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

7 " A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. —Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997 "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

8 " An enormous semiofficial drug-smuggling operation was established in order to improve Britain's unfavorable balance of payments with China—the direct result of the British love of tea. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

9 " The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world's leading commercial power. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

10 " Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. —Aristophanes, Greek comic poet (c. 450-385 BCE) "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

11 " You Americans are a very singular people," he later recalled to one of his friends. "I went with my automaton all over my own country—the Germans wondered and said nothing. In France they exclaimed, Magnifique! Merveilleux! Superbe! The English set themselves to prove—one that it could be, and another that it could not be, a mere mechanism acting without a man inside. But I had not been long in your country, before a Yankee came to see me and said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like another thing like that? I can make you one for five hundred dollars.' I laughed at his proposition. A few months afterwards, the same Yankee came to see me again, and this time he said, 'Mr Maelzel, would you like to buy another thing like that? I have one already made for you. "

― Tom Standage , The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine

12 " The inclusion of lemon or lime juice in grog, made compulsory in 1795, therefore reduced the incidence of scurvy dramatically. And since beer contains no vitamin C, switching from beer to grog made British crews far healthier overall. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

13 " The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer. —Egyptian proverb, c. 2200 BCE "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

14 " John Adams, by then one of the country's founding fathers, wrote to a friend: "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

15 " Is it any surprise that the current center of coffee culture, the city of Seattle, home to the Starbucks coffeehouse chain, is also where some of the world's largest software and Internet firms are based? Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking—plus a dash of revolutionary fervor—has a long pedigree. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

16 " such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as "

― Tom Standage , Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years

17 " Coffeehouses were centers of self-education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation, and, in some cases, political fermentation. But above all they were clearinghouses for news and gossip, linked by the circulation of customers, publications, and information from one establishment to the next. Collectively, Europe's coffeehouses functioned as the Internet of the Age of Reason. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

18 " By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

19 " Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. "

― Tom Standage , A History of the World in 6 Glasses

20 " One common abbreviation used in Roman letters was SPD, which was short for salutem plurimam dicit, or “sends many greetings.” This served as a greeting at the beginning of a letter, to indicate the sender and the receiver, as in “Marcus Sexto SPD” (“Marcus sends many greetings to Sextus”). Another popular acronym was SVBEEV, which was short for si vales, bene est, ego valeo (“if you are well, that is good, I am well”). Such abbreviations saved space and time, just as acronyms (BTW, AFAIK, IANAL) do today in Internet posts and text messages. "

― Tom Standage , Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years