Liverpool Quotes (3 quotes)
In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now? … Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner’s compass, gunpowder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their painting,—are the delight and tuition of ours. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, and the necessity of reform in the calendar; looking over how many horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, he announced that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals; and machines to fly into the air like birds.
In 'Progress of Culture', an address read to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, 18 July 1867. Collected in Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883), 475.
The quality of Mersey is not strained. A century ago the river of that name, in England, afforded not less than sixty varieties of fish; now it affords none. (1876)
Description of the turbid, polluted River Mersey, Liverpool, England in the nineteenth century. In Daily Alta California (21 Aug 1876), 28, No. 9633, 2. The expression “The quality of Mersey is not strained” is seen repeated in various sources through the years to the present. The pun refers a line in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice that “The quality of mercy is not strained.” An earlier mention appears in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Dec 1870), 42, No. 247, 158.
The river Mersey, a mile-wide estuary not unlike the Hudson, perhaps in my childhood even more filthy. We used to say “the quality of Mersey is not strained.”
In Kenneth Ewart Boulding and Richard P. Beilock (Ed.), Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms (1980, 2009), 3.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
