New Guinea Quotes & Sayings

7.3-magnitude earthquake hits near Papua New Guinea A powerful earthquake struck off the South Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The U.S. Geological Survey said the magnitude-7.3 earthquake was located 61 kilometres (38 miles) southwest of the town of Panguna on Bougainville Island. It struck at a depth of 50 kilometres (31 miles). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami. But the agency said quakes of this size can sometimes generate waves that can be destructive to coasts within a few hundred kilometres (miles) of the epicenter. A staffer at the Geophysical Observatory in the capital, Port Moresby, said no reports of damage or unusual wave activity along — Anonymous

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? — Jared Diamond

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists — G.K. Chesterton

My own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery. — Jared Diamond

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy. — Sam Lipsyte

In Highland New Guinea, now Popua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from. — Annie Dillard

To ensure that the pigs can't run away, farmers in northern New Guinea slice off a chunk of each pig's nose. This causes severe pain whenever the pig tries to sniff. Since the pigs cannot find food or even find their way around without sniffing, this mutilation makes them completely dependent on their human owners. In another area of New Guinea, it has been customary to gouge out pigs' eyes, so that they cannot even see where they're going.7 — Yuval Noah Harari

When Captain Moresby landed on New Guinea, a medicine-man exorcised the evil spirit in him by magical jugglery with palm leaves and by playing a kind of leapfrog. — Elsie Clews Parsons

With the loss of acute illnesses we have seen a loss of human potential and a dramatic increase in chronic 'incurable' diseases. If we want to return to health, we have to look at disease in a way that is different from the accepted medical models, because these models do not work. There has been no overall improvement in the mortality rates for most forms of cancer in the past 100 years, yet still people put their faith in drugs, surgery and radiation. Terminal patients are often offered 'new drugs' in the hope of prolonging life but are in fact being treated as little more than guinea pigs. All disease is curable, but the cure can only be found within the body. — Barbara Wren

Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. — Jared Diamond

Long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choice in the matter?) We monkeys have — Nick Webb

When they were in Papua New Guinea, God just totally grabbed a hold of Will's heart and totally changed him. And within three months he was saved and he's never looked back since. — Michael Scott

Somewhere in the world there must be a cult of divination centered on the interpretation of cranial sutures, but he couldn't recall any from his Cultural Anthro classes. Papua New Guinea maybe. They were big into cranial curation there. — Scott Nicolay

Wars have been waged over millions of square miles, significantly larger than the British Empire at its peak. Historically, Islamic conquests stretched from southern France to the Philippines, from Austria to Nigeria, and from central Asia to New Guinea. The Muslim goal was to have a central government, first at Damascus, and then at Baghdad, later at Cairo, Istanbul, and other imperial centres. The local governors, judges, and other rulers were appointed by the central imperial authorities for far off colonies. Islamic law was introduced as the senior law, whether or not wanted by the local people. Arabic was introduced as the rulers' language, while the local languages frequently disappeared. Then, two classes of residents were established. The native residents paid a tax that their rulers did not have to pay. In each case, these laws allowed the local conquered people less freedom than was given to Muslims. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

So you talk about the mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the baron's wars. — G.K. Chesterton

When this war is over we should raise a memorial in every Australian capital to the New Guinea natives so that we may never forget how much of the white man's burden was carried by the natives in this roadless jungle warfare ... so that we may remember how many Australians owe their lives to the natives who bore the wounded in their stretchers across the tortuous trail to safety. — Chester Wilmot

Today, the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse, with the exception of a few isolated pockets in Papua New Guinea, India, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Tanzania, Kenya, or Sierra Leone, where "witches" are still burned to death. A 2002 World Health Organization study, for example, reported that every year more than 500 elderly women in Tanzania alone are killed for being "witches." In Nigeria, children by the thousands are being rounded up and torched as "witches," and in response the Nigerian government arrested a self-styled bishop named Okon Williams, who it accused of killing 110 such children. — Michael Shermer

In New Guinea, they had a disease called kuru, transmitted by eating the brains of their enemies." "That's not true." "Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize for it. They were eating brains, all right. — Michael Crichton

In New Guinea, as in other hot spots of endangerment, indigenous languages are a user's guide to ecosystems that are increasingly fragile and - in the face of climate change - increasingly irreplaceable. — Anonymous

My art collection is dominated by tribal art from Nigeria where I taught school, from New Guinea where we've travelled, and by Canadian Haida pieces. My own art is either on exhibition or owned by other people! — Robert Bateman

The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars. When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich. — G.K. Chesterton

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: "Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle." What we understand and learn about rising strong is only rumor until we live it and integrate it through some form of creativity so that it becomes part of us. — Brene Brown

I was criticized at some level within the Republican Party by those who say government should not be in the economic development business at all. My response is that the only country I know that doesn't have an economic development plan is Papa New Guinea. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

[Calvin and Hobbes are playing Scrabble.]
Calvin: Ha! I've got a great word and it's on a "Double word score" box!
Hobbes: "ZQFMGB" isn't a word! It doesn't even have a vowel!
Calvin: It is so a word! It's a worm found in New Guinea! Everyone knows that!
Hobbes: I'm looking it up.
Calvin: You do, and I'll look up that 12-letter word you played with all the Xs and Js!
Hobbes: What's your score for ZQFMGB?
Calvin: 957. — Bill Watterson

As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, "Life was better since the government came" because "a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. — Steven Pinker

I would like to go to Kalimantan island in Sumatra to see the carvings and longhouse sculptures. I've also always wanted to look at the wood carvings along the Sepik River in New Guinea. — Antony Gormley

All religions must, at their core, look forward to the end of this world and to the longed-for moment when all will be revealed and when the sheep will be divided from the goats, or whatever other bucolic Bronze-Age desert analogy might seem apt. (In Papua New Guinea, where as in most tropical climes there are no sheep, the Christians use the most valued animal of the locals and refer to the congregation as "swine." Flock, herd: what difference does it make?) Against this insane eschatology, with its death wish and its deep contempt for the life of the mind, atheists have always argued that this world is all that we have, and that our duty is to one another to make the very most and best of it. Theism cannot coexist with this unexceptionable conclusion. — Christopher Hitchens

Guinea has managed to go 42 days consecutively without any new Ebola infections. And that comes after neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, the other two West African countries that were hardest hit by Ebola, have been through the same cycle of zero Ebola cases. — Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

common table sugar, or sucrose, is a carbohydrate made up of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. All plants produce sucrose, but a few contain very large quantities. Natives in the land now called New Guinea, the massive island north of Australia, discovered a tropical grass that came to be known as sugarcane, perhaps around 8000 BC. The sweet-tasting stalks were eventually carried to other lands, including India, where juices pressed from sugarcane were first boiled to produce crystals. Darius — Richard J. Johnson

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. — G.K. Chesterton

No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan just as certainly none could be spent upon building a college upon a new plan: therefore the guinea should be earmarked "Rags. Petrol. Matches." And this note should be attached to it. "Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows and cry, "Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this 'education! — Virginia Woolf

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years. — Michael Leunig

I lived through this, I needed to find a new fuckin' job. Janitor. Used car salesman. Guinea pig trainer. — Jessica Gadziala

I enjoyed being president, but the campaign against Guinea worm [horrible disease] has opened up a completely new career that is challenging and unpredictable and adventurous - and very gratifying. — Jimmy Carter

It's cold and clammy in the alley like White Scar Cave in the Yorkshire Dales. Dad took me when I was ten. I find a dead cat lying on the ground at the first corner. It's gray like dust on the moon. I know it's dead because it's as still as a dropped bag, and because big flies are drinking from its eyes. How did it die? There's no bullet wound or fang marks, though its head's at a slumped angle so maybe it was strangled by a cat-strangler. It goes straight into the Top Five of the Most Beautiful Things I've Ever Seen. Maybe there's a tribe in Papua New Guinea who think the droning of flies is music. Maybe I'd fit in with them. "Come along, Nathan." Mum's tugging my sleeve. — David Mitchell

They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.' — P. J. O'Rourke

In '73 I photographed the cannibals in New Guinea. They treated me OK but they didn't make you feel relaxed ... I managed to escape unscathed though, I'm pretty good at that. — David Bailey

I was researching a different World War II story when I came across an article in the 'Chicago Tribune' from June 1945 that knocked me for a loop. The article explained that a military plane had crashed in an impossibly remote valley of New Guinea that had been nicknamed Shangri-La. — Mitchell Zuckoff

An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax. — David Letterman

Australia / New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia / New Guinea formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles, including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles. — Jared Diamond

Researchers found a frog in new guinea that is so tiny, they believe it's the smallest vertebrate on the planet. It has the tiniest backbone of any living creature, except members of Congress. — Jay Leno