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Paleontologist Inspirational Quotes (774)

Page 11 of 33
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I was born to be an explorer. There never was any decision to make. I coudn't be anything else and be happy,the desire to see new places, to discover new facts- the curiosity of life always has been a resistless driving force to me.
Roy Chapman Andrews
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It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'
Charles Lyell
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It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.
Charles Lyell
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There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.
Thomas Huxley
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It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Huxley
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Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
Nathan Myhrvold
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In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.
Stephen Jay Gould
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It's well known that actors are lousy writers.
Richard E. Grant
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No one-liner can ever be optimal.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts in the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man.
George Gaylord Simpson
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It is better to have a few forms well known than to teach a little about many hundred species. Better a dozen specimens thoroughly studied as the result of the first year's work, than to have two thousand dollars' worth of shells and corals bought from a curiosity-shop. The dozen animals would be your own.
Louis Agassiz
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I had never passed a single school exam, and clearly never would.
Mary Leakey
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Perhaps the only thing that saves science from invalid conventional wisdom that becomes effectively permanent is the presence of mavericks in every generation - people who keep challenging convention and thinking up new ideas for the sheer hell of it or from an innate contrariness.
David M. Raup
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The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.
Edward Forbes
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Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
Stephen Jay Gould
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Tradition was safety change was danger.
Mary Doria Russell
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If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.
George Gaylord Simpson
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I never felt interpretation was my job.
Mary Leakey
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Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.
Richard Leakey
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Uniformity and Evolution are one.
Charles Lapworth
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It is better to predict dramatic things that don't happen than boring things that do.
Nathan Myhrvold
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But science is the collection of nature's answers the humanities the collection of men's thoughts.
Gavin de Beer
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[Geology] may be looked upon as the history of the earth's changes during preparation for the reception of organized beings, a history, which has all the character of a great epic.
Edward Forbes
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History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
Stephen Jay Gould
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