David Grann

During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns__"sprained brain," as he called it___e had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).

One of the things I believe strongly in is developing institutions - legal, press, bureaucracies, academies - that are rooted in the pursuit of impartial truth. That aren't simply just bent to partisan ends or are corrupted for the powerful or for other ulterior motives.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

The political hero is not like the sports champion or matinee idol or daring inventor; like the war hero, he is born only of tragedy.

During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga The-the, the Killer of Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

An Indian Affairs agent said, 'The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon