“It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.”

David A. Ridenour, "If Your Car Ran on Bottled Water, You'd be Paying $6.40 a Gallon," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 1, 2006

Of Paradise and Power, p. 43

As quoted in The Observer (26 November 1989)

Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: Did you really say that?, 2007-11-15 http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that,
Source: The C++ Programming Language

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

[Andy Rooney, w:Andy Rooney, 197, Labels, Years of Minutes, 2003, PublicAffairs, 978-1586482114]

Afterword to The Dud Avocado (2006)
Context: Halfway through writing the book, I still had no title. It came wonderfully into being when I complimented my host at a party on his flourishing avocado plant. I said, I’d kept trying and failing with my own avocado pits. Someone said, what you’ve got is a dud avocado, and Ken said, that’s a good title for a novel. I thought, this title is mine, and it was. Ken and I had the same agent, and for a publisher we decided on Victor Gollancz, who was so good with first novels. Wonderfully, he accepted it, but with several caveats. He didn’t like the title. It sounded like a cookbook. He also wanted me to write under my married name. I said no to both. He accepted. He decided it needed a subtitle, "La Vie Amoureuse of Sally Jay in Paris." I said, Oh no, no! He said, this was the first time in his experience that an unknown writer had complained about a book cover. However, he did put on the book’s jacket that the subtitle was the publisher’s. Ken read it in proof and said, "You’ve got a thumping great best-seller here." Curiously, the first thing I felt was relief. I believed him. No one could predict how a play or novel would be received by the public like Ken could. And only then was I set free to let excitement take hold of me.

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 2, Einstein, p. 25

citing Nainar, Arab geographers, Habibullah, Foundations
Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D.