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Natural History Quotes

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780)
- John Adams

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
- John Quincy Adams

In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.
- David Attenborough

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

Natural history is not about producing fables.
- David Attenborough

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

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

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.
- David Attenborough

If I were beginning my career today, I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if I were beginning today, I'd be there.
- David Attenborough

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.
- Charles Babbage

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
- John Burroughs

There is no greater power on this earth than story." Will paced the length of the room. "People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsensewords do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutionswords. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History." Will grabbed the sheaf of newspaper clippings he kept in a stack on his desk. "This, and these"he gestured to the library's teeming shelves"they're a testament to the country's rich supernatural history.
- Libba Bray

The good news was that "biology" turned out to be the magic password for working at the Museum of Natural History, just the way "art history" would at the Met or "trust fund" at the MoMA.
- Sloane Crosley

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

Who will bear witness to these small islands and oases of wildness as land is divided and sold to become strip malls, housing developments,and parking lots? What happens to the natural history here? We must bear witness.
- E L James

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

But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
- Richard Owen

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

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

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.
- Ernest Thompson Seton

We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?
- Lisa Unger

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

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.
- Alfred Russel Wallace

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense
Of joy.
I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision (1974)
- Robert Penn Warren

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
- Gilbert White

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