Specific Mortality Rates

Famous quotes containing the words specific, mortality and/or rates:

“The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

“The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.”
—William Dean Howells (1837–1920)

“[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)