Top 65 Quotes by Rose George

Perhaps we believe that everything travels by air, or magically and instantaneously like information (which is actually anchored by cables on the seabed), not by hefty ships that travel more slowly than senior citizens drive.

The average human being spends three years of life going to the toilet, though the average human being with no physical toilet to go to probably does his or her best to spend less. It is a human behavior that is as revealing as any other about human nature, but only if it can be released from the social straitjacket of nicety.

My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brain damage - is too expensive.

We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff, and desalination is expensive.

In some of the great cities of Europe - Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels - tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.

We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures.