Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything
Pages 446-447, footnote
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
On the Death of the New Gods storyline, as quoted in "Jim Starlin Kills The New Gods" at Comicon.com (August 2007) http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=006822
Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything
Pages 446-447, footnote
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_story_of_my_boyhood_and_youth/ (1913), chapter 5: Young Hunters <br class="br">1910s
“I'm the top of the food chain and well… you're the food.”
Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil
Source: Dance with the Devil
Lynne Truss (1955) British writer
Source: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
“War will exist as long as there's a food chain.”
P. J. O'Rourke book Holidays in Hell
Holidays in Hell (1989)
Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter
A Tobey Profile, quoted by Belle Krasne, Art Digest, 26 Oct. 15, 1951
1950's
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist
The Nature, Importance and Liberties of Belief (1873)
Context: I look at a large tree on the lawn, and say to my neighbour: "What is that tree to you?" He looks at it, and says: "Well, I think that would cut about twenty cords of wood. You could work in a good many branches, and as the price of wood is in the market, I think I could make fifty dollars out of that tree easily, and perhaps more than that." His answer shows what the tree is to him — and it is that." I call up a boy, and say to him: "What do you think of when you look at that tree?" "Ah!" he says, "there will be a bushel of hickory-nuts on that tree, anyhow; and he begins to think how he will climb it, and shake them down, and what he will do with them. That is what the tree says to him. I say to another person: "What is that tree to you?" He says: "I would not take fifty dollars for it. Under it my cows stand in summer. The shade of that tree has stood me instead of a shed ever since I owned this farm. That tree is worth its weight in gold." He values it for its economic uses. I ask a painter: "What is that tree to you?" At once he says: "Do you see what an exquisite form it has? How picturesque it is? If you were to take it and put it in the foreground of the landscape that I am working on, what a magnificent effect you would get!" It has an aesthetic value to him. I ask another man: "What is it to you?" He goes into an explanation of its structure and qualities. He is a botanist, and he has his peculiar view of it. I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it.
So it is with truths. Men sort them. They bring different faculties to bear in considering them. One person has philosophical reason; another has factual reason. One man brings one part of his mind to it; another brings to it another part of his mind. The truth is larger than any one man's thought of it. The truth of God usually has relations that stretch out in such a way that men may see it very differently, and all of them be true in spots, although they do not have the whole truth.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
The argument is really no better than that.
"The First-cause Argument"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
“I find it hard to sit still in one spot, and impossible to sit still in two spots.”
Brother Theodore (1906–2001) German-American monologuist and comedian