I am a retired (age) bushie and back-packer.
My wife and I (and sometimes our dog) have travelled extensively in our beautiful land - particularly the north.  Apart from age, what has decided us to stay at home is the massive amount of people on all our roads.  All our quiet camping spots have gone.  We avoided caravan parks wherever possible and when we left a camping site no one would notice where we have camped.  But all overrun by crowds of thoughtless people.
We are atheists from way back and very thrilled that our numbers are growing and so many thousands are finding that religion is really 'the root of all evil'.

Of making many books there is no end.

— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 12:12.

Look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.

— William Gilbert (1540-1603), De Magnete [All About Magnets], 1600

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

— Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), Proposition Touching Amendment of Laws.

A fishmonger near the British Museum once discovered that parchment or limp vellum, though defaced by ancient ink or paint, was better than oiled paper for wrapping fish.  Before the authorities caught up with him, numerous rare manuscripts had found their way into London kitchens, and from thence to the trash bin.

— Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps, Dover edition, 1979, p. 6.

Whitehead caught the unhistorical spirit of the scientific community when he wrote, 'A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.'  Yet he was not quite right, for the sciences, like other professional enterprises, do need their heroes and do preserve their names.  Fortunately, instead of forgetting these heroes, scientists have been able to forget or revise their works.

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 138-139.

Contrast this situation with that in at least the contemporary natural sciences.  In these fields the student relies mainly on textbooks until, in his third or fourth year of graduate work, he begins his own research.  Many science curricula do not ask even graduate students to read in works not written specially for students.

— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, p. 165

Another damned, thick square book!  Always scribble, scribble, scribble!  Eh!  Mr. Gibbon?

— William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (1743-1805) (attributed).

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 - 1910), 'Notice' at the start of Huckleberry Finn, 1884.

You know in England we read their works, but seldom or never take notice of authors.  We think them sufficiently paid if their books sell, and of course leave them in their colleges and obscurity, by which means we are not troubled with their vanity and impertinence.

— Sir Robert Walpole (1676 - 1745), to the philosopher, David Hume.

Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely first, voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over; secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions; thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of the index, sees as much as if he were in the house.

— Thomas Fuller (1608 - 1661), Worthies of England.

If I were to pray for a taste which would stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown on me, it would be a taste for reading.

— Sir John Herschel (1792 - 1871) 'Address to the Subscribers of the Windsor and Eton Public Libraries', Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), p. 73.

King David and King Solomon
  Led merry, merry lives,
With many, many lady friends
  And many, many wives;

But when old age crept over them,
  With many, many qualms,
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
  And King David wrote the Psalms.

—  James Ball Naylor

My desire is . . . that mine adversary had written a book.

— Holy Bible, Job, 31:35.

Lily: 'We looked at the books about crystals but they are so dreadful.'

— John Ruskin (1819 - 1900) The Ethics of the Dust, Ten Lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallisation, 1866.

If you happen to have an Elzevir classic in your pocket, neither show it nor mention it.

— Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 - 1773), Letters from a Celebrated Nobleman to his Heir,

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

— Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835 - 1910), Mark Twain's Speeches, 1910.

Thou should'st be living at this hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.

— Heathcote William Garrod

To such a person my hope has been that my treatise would prove of the very greatest assistance.  Still, such people may be expected to be quite few in number, while, as for the others, this book will be as superfluous to them as a tale told to an ass.

— Galen, On the natural faculties III, 10

I was in a Printing-House in Hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

— William Blake (1757 - 1827)

For those who haven't seen this series before, during 2010, I will be sharing some of my favourite quotes, organised inro themes that make sense to me.

Many various kinds of ants inhabit New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land; I know about a dozen species myself.  One is a very formidable-looking personage, full an inch long, with a shiny coat of mail gleaming purple and blue, and a threatening sting, which I am told inflicts a most painful wound, as severe as that of the hornet.

— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales.  London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, page 69.

Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer.

— Holy Bible, Proverbs 30:25.

Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.

— Holy Bible, Proverbs, 6:6.

My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions

— Holy Bible, 1 Kings, 12:11.

The insect I am now describing lived three years; every year it changed its skin, and got a new set of legs.  I have sometimes plucked off a leg, which grew again in two or three days.  At first it dreaded my approach to its web; but at last it became so familiar as to take a fly out of my hand, and upon my touching any part of the web, would immediately leave its hole, prepared either for defence or an attack.

— Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774), 'The Philosopher and the Spider', in Animated Nature.

It is proven today that the tarantula is innocuous, as are almost all spiders in our country; but there is not a child, especially in the country, whose mother does not say: 'Don't touch it, it's a spider, it's poisonous'; and childhood memories are indelible.

— Primo Levi, 'The Fear of Spiders' in Other People's Trades, page 144.

'Will you walk into my parlour?' said a spider to a fly

'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy.

— Mary Howitt (1799-1888)  The Spider and the Fly.

Many people, children and adults, men and women, brave and fearful, are deeply repelled by spiders, and if they are asked why spiders in particular, they usually answer: 'Because they have eight legs.'

— Primo Levi, 'The Fear of Spiders' in Other People's Trades, page 141.

So why aren't people as frightened of two red setters, which have longer and hairier legs, which can run faster, jump higher, and can surround you?

— Duncan Bain (pseud.) (1944 -  )  'Wring the toxin', from Carl Orff the Dogs, Anura Books, 1985.

Long before the Great Age of Dinosaurs, creatures of humbler build called arthropods began to leave the sea and adopt a life on the land.  Not only were arthropods, which include all those animals with an external skeleton and jointed limbs such as insects, ticks, scorpions and centipedes, the first animals to colonize the land but according to many zoologists they will also be the last survivors.

— Barbara York Main, Spiders, Collins, 1984, 13.

Recently, I posted a selection of newspaper fulminations about falling standards, some of them almost a hudred years old.

Here is another one, taken from Scientific American, March 8, 1862, page 146.  The introduction tells us that the piece was lifted from some other journal, and the context makes it clear the journal was British.

The Barbarism of Steel Pens.

I am aware, says a recent writer, that it may be very fairly said that if a man is green enough to be induced by any representations of seller or advertiser, to make his coffee with a windlass, and shave himself with a stone, the only verdict he can expect from an intelligent jury is "served him right;" but look at another invention, under the tyranny of which we all groan more or less, but which very few have the strength of mind to resist. Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land until decent handwriting (sic!) is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right—the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go on, that of the next will be worse. The fine Roman hand of the last century has died out; the steel can’t do it. There is neither grace nor legibility in the angular scrawl that prevails now. Open any parish register of fifty years back, and see in what a fine legible hand, and scholar-like too in most cases, the parson of that day made his entries. Our present young parson, though he took a first-class at Oxford, and wears a most correct waistcoat, doesn’t do it, and couldn’t do it if his benefit of clergy depended on it.

The dropping of standards seems to be a perennial complaint!