What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that’s always been my motto.

You expect this river trip to be an experience of the past - and it is. But it is also a glimpse of the future. In a hundred years or so, under a cold uncolonized moon, what we call the civilized world will all look like China, muddy and senile and old-fangled: no trees, no birds, and shortages of fuel and metal and meat; but plenty of pushcarts, cobblestones, ditch-diggers, and wooden inventions. Nine hundred million farmers splashing through puddles and the rest of the population growing weak and blind working the crashing looms in black factories. Forget rocket-ships, super-technology, moving sidewalks and all the rubbishy hope in science fiction. No one will ever go to Mars and live. A religion has evolved from the belief that we have a future in outer space; but it is a half-baked religion - it is a little like Mormonism or the Cargo Cult. Our future is this mildly poisoned earth and its smoky air. We are in for hunger and hard work, the highest stage of poverty - no starvation, but crudeness everywhere, clumsy art, simple language, bad books, brutal laws, plain vegetables, and clothes of one colour. It will be damp and dull, like this. It will be monochrome and crowded - how could it be different? There will be no star wars or galactic empires and no more money to waste on the loony nationalism in space programmes. Our grandchildren will probably live in a version of China. On the dark brown banks of the Yangtze the future has already arrived.

However it ends, the Anthropocene will be brief.

The next two centuries will be an interesting time. Our ingenuity as a species could let us get through this. Our darker natures and impulses, however, in the face of sudden climate change, could result in the loss of half of all humans on Earth in a century or less.

It’s not what you believe: who really knows? Far more important is the map you draw of yourself.

Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do - knowing no better, having no choice.

Now I would like to be as if without a face, a rolled-up hedgehog that only opens up in the ditch in the evening and cautiously comes up and holds its grey snout up at the stars.

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

There is no wealth but life.

A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the Mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.

On any Romano-British site the impression that constantly haunts the archaeologist, like a bad smell or a stickiness on the fingers, is that of an ugliness which pervades the place like a London fog; not merely the common vulgar ugliness of the Roman empire, but a blundering stupid ugliness that cannot even rise to the level of that vulgarity.

Old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despised, frost, the dancing maggots, sheepdogs, and particularly the stars which make time a paradox and a joke till we can give up our own time, even though we wasted it.