Nitrous Quotes

1. "In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11'. For the next half-century it would be the drug of choice for young people. One learned body, the Askesian Society, was for a time devoted to little else. Theatres put on ‘laughing gas evenings'12 where volunteers could refresh themselves with a robust inhalation and then entertain the audience with their comical staggerings. It wasn't until 1846 that anyone got around to finding a practical use for nitrous oxide, as an anaesthetic. Goodness knows how many tens of thousands of people suffered unnecessary agonies under the surgeon's knife because no-one had thought of the gas's most obvious practical application."
Author: Bill Bryson

2. "A small bubble of air remained unabsorbed... if there is any part of the phlogisticated air [nitrogen] of our atmosphere which differs from the rest, and cannot be reduced to nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more than 1/120 part of the whole.[Cavendish did not realize the significance of the remaining small bubble. Not until a century later were the air's Noble Gases appreciated.]"
Author: Henry Cavendish

3. "Laugh if you will... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide."
Author: John Sladek

4. "All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away."
Author: Robert Anton Wilson

5. "Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
Author: Terry Pratchett

Nitrous Quotes Pictures