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Natural History Quotes

We’ve collected the best Natural History Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Deborah Moggach, Whitfield Diffie, Matt Ridley, Richard Owen, David Attenborough. Use them as an inspiration.

1
I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
Deborah Moggach
2
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
3
I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.
Matt Ridley
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
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
8
My sixth book, ‘A Breath of Snow and Ashes,’ was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.
Diana Gabaldon
9
I first drew the attention of my future husband when we were fourteen, on the freshman school bus for an epic field trip from Riverside, Calif. to Los Angeles, where we were taken to the L.A. Zoo as well as the Natural History Museum.
Susan Straight
10
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
11
If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.
Dominic Monaghan
12
The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
Gilbert White
13
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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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
18
I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.
Jane Goodall
19
I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.
John Burroughs
20
If you don’t work near a water cooler and hanker for the company of fellow natural history enthusiasts, ‘The Blue Planet II Podcast’ has Emily Knight and Becky Ripley enthusing infectiously about and delving deeper into the most recent episode.
David Hepworth
21
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
22
While I was thinking about the next film to do, I was also reading this book by Diane Ackerman called ‘The Natural History of the Senses’ – an anthropological and sociological look at the senses. But it also has this great sense of enthusiasm.
Jeremy Podeswa
23
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
24
I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.
Ernest Thompson Seton
25
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
26
I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being.
Arthur Darvill
27
The American Museum of Natural History is my son‘s absolute favorite place in the world! So we really, really, really love New York.
Mark Teixeira
28
Natural history is not about producing fables.
David Attenborough
29
In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.
Janet Yellen
30
I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.
Richard Dawkins