Top 100 Quotes About Natural History
#1. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#2. The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.
James Hutton
#3. The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.
Chris Weedon
#5. SMALL BOY: Where do animals go when they die? SMALL GIRL: All good animals go to heaven, but the bad ones go to the Natural History Museum. - Caption to a drawing by E.H. Shepard, PUNCH, 1929 SIMON
Sarah R. Shaber
#6. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.
Ernst W. Mayr
#7. The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.
David Attenborough
#8. I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.
Frances Burney
#9. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Penelope Lively
#10. Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man.
Paul Verhoeven
#11. Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.
Louise J. Kaplan
#12. History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.
James Harvey Robinson
#13. In the last eight weeks I had experienced two of the three best times of my adult life, assuming all visits to the Museum of Natural History were treated as one event. They had both been with Rosie. Was there a correlation? It was critical to find out.
Graeme Simsion
#14. It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
H.G.Wells
#15. Nothing is more clear than that Christ cannot be explained by any humanistic system. He does not fit into any theory of natural evolution, for in that case the perfect flower of humanity should have appeared at the end of human history and not in the middle of it.
Loraine Boettner
#16. Ali was the natural choice as he was the most respected Companion still alive and was related to Prophet in two ways
Firas Alkhateeb
#17. If you take a look at our natural history, there's always a moment where the young lion wants to challenge the older lion and, inherently, that's going to be problematic, and I don't think we're any different.
Kiefer Sutherland
#18. I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.
David H. Koch
#19. War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.
Ruth Benedict
#20. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Stephen Jay Gould
#21. Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.
William Irwin Thompson
#22. [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.
Stephen Jay Gould
#23. To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
Thomas Huxley
#24. If we once and for so long lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history .
John Zerzan
#25. The wine world is so big. Yes, there are styles of wines I don't like. Orange wine, natural wines and low-alcohol wines. Truth is on my side, and history will prove I am right.
Robert M. Parker Jr.
#26. He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history
the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
Don DeLillo
#27. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.
Junius Williams
#28. Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily, and this limit has taught man all through history the size of rural or urban communities.
Leon Krier
#29. Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
Theodore Roosevelt
#30. Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.
Raymond Williams
#31. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.
Richard Fortey
#32. Born to be a natural artist you love or hate but can't deny
While us minions in our millions tumble into history's chasm
We might have a couple of laughs but we're still wastes of protoplasm
Jeffrey Lewis
#33. The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.
Michael E. DeBakey
#34. The parent must not give in to his desire to try to create the child he would like to have, but rather help the child to develop
in his own good time
to the fullest, into what he wishes to be and can be, in line with his natural endowment and as the consequence of his unique life in history.
Bruno Bettelheim
#35. The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.
Charles Kellogg
#37. I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
#38. Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
Jane Smiley
#39. Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
Jim Crace
#40. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
#41. Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
Sarah Vowell
#42. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#43. Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
Derek Walcott
#44. I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.
Prince Philip
#45. Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.
Robert Falcon Scott
#46. The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.
Fernand Leger
#47. There is no counting the unsolved problems of Natural History.
J. Arthur Thomson
#48. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being.
Danah Boyd
#49. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
Yuval Noah Harari
#50. In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.
C. V. Raman
#51. The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
Haniel Long
#52. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#53. Her interest in natural history was confined to observation of the crows' feet gathering around her eyes.
Nicolas Bentley
#54. This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.
Margaret E. Knight
#55. The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.
Anna Pavlova
#56. My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Ellen Tauscher
#57. Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.
Jim Crace
#58. My father ... never required me to study anything, but he knew how to inspire in me a great desire for knowledge. Before learning to read, my greatest pleasure was to listen to passages from Buffon's natural history. I constantly requested him to read me the history of animals and birds ...
Andre-Marie Ampere
#59. I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician.
Whitfield Diffie
#60. If humanity will one day grasp the importance of natural food, this will be the beginning of a new era in the history of human life; it will simply be the PARADISE.
Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
#61. I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.
Vaclav Klaus
#62. Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published 'The World of Mind,' is the Isaac Taylor, author of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm.' I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain.
George Eliot
#63. It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling.
Sean Penn
#64. Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.
Lawrence Millman
#65. A man who risks his life in shooting big game in order to secure good specimens for natural history collections, or to rid a district of a man-eater or other dangerous neighbor, is a sportsman in the true sense.
Robert Baden-Powell
#66. And it's not like I'm the only guy in history to ever get a hard on in a high school locker room; for a lot of guys it's just a natural reaction to the cool moist air. But the trouble is that around certain guys, I'm radically reactionary.
Huston Piner
#67. I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
John Burroughs
#68. I would choose the heat above an equal degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.
Marie Brennan
#69. You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for.
David Attenborough
#70. When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.
Charles Darwin
#71. Most cowgirls are natural storytellers, their art honed by years of practice ... It serves as entertainment; it also preserves the humor and value of a unique way of life.
Teresa Jordan
#72. The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
Gilbert White
#73. My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won't be reversed: by now the Jonathan's as much an American as I am.
Michael Pollan
#74. History shows that ... (people) can be deflected from their natural tendencies by artful propaganda, bogus crises, or other political trickery.
Robert Higgs
#75. But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon
#76. If you have a good story, it doesn't have to be overproduced. I want our stories to reveal the wonders of the human spirit and the richness of life in California, including its history, people, culture and natural wonders.
Huell Howser
#78. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Johann Hari
#79. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow.
David Attenborough
#81. I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.
[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
#82. All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again - finally turning into an expectation - then theories are overturned.
Stephen Jay Gould
#83. It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#84. History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#85. Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Charles Lamb
#86. Here's the story of how Pluto lost its planetary status and was demoted to an ice ball in the outer solar system. It's also about my role in this at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#87. Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#88. Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran
#89. Racial history is therefore natural history and the mysticism of the soul at one and the same time; but the history of the religion of the blood, conversely, is the great world story of the rise and downfall of peoples, their heroes and thinkers, their inventors and artists.
Alfred Rosenberg
#90. Throughout history
even a hundred years ago, even fifty
it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
#91. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#92. I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
Charles Darwin
#93. Read a certain way, the Natural History is preposterous, full of erroneous assumptions and cast-off mythology. Read another way, it is a window into Roman understanding two millennia ago. Read another way, it is a tribute to wonder itself
Anthony Doerr
#95. Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude.
Benjamin Franklin
#96. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#97. A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.
Raymond Geuss
#98. And finally, for readers who find themselves wanting to know more about the living green that surrounds us, I recommend that they waste no time in getting ahold of P. A. Thomas's book Trees: Their Natural History (2000),
Hope Jahren
#99. Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape
Oliver Sacks
#100. Of all America's natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony.
Markham Shaw Pyle
