Richard Conniff famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.
-- Richard Conniff

#Nature #Medical #Naturalist
The natural world is full of females falling hard for stupid male display behavior, including bright feathers, big antlers, and bombastic courtship rituals.
-- Richard Conniff

#Sex #Stupid #Fall
Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.
-- Richard Conniff

#Beer #Two #Race
As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs." But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note."
-- Richard Conniff

#Writing #Editors #History
The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we'll not survive this one.
-- Richard Conniff

#Black #Age #Modern Life

Nature is a book of many pages and each page tells a fascinating story to him who learns her language. Our fertile valleys and craggy mountains recite an epic poem of geologic conflicts. The starry sky reveal gigantic suns and space and time without end.
Volcanic action is essentially paroxysmal; yet Mr. Lyell will admit no greater paroxysms than we ourselves have witnessed-no periods of feverish spasmodic energy, during which the very framework of nature has been convulsed and torn asunder. The utmost movements that he allows are a slight quivering of her muscular integuments.
Among the older records, we find chapter after chapter of which we can read the characters, and make out their meaning: and as we approach the period of man's creation, our book becomes more clear, and nature seems to speak to us in language so like our own, that we easily comprehend it. But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part, our chronicle seems to fail us-a leaf has been torn out from nature's record, and the succession of events is almost hidden from our eyes.
We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.
...the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected.
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.
An untreatable diagnosis is a statement about the medical system, not the patient.
I'm 86 and my doctor used to tell me to slow down - at least he did until he dropped dead.
In short, it is not that evolutionary naturalists have been less brazen than the scientific creationists in holding science hostage, but rather that they have been infinitely more effective in getting away with it.
I like to think of myself as a naturalist - insofar as that term is at all clear.

Richard Conniff famous quotes

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