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Who said: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index P > Richard Preston, Quotes

Richard Preston,
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Science Quotes by Richard Preston, (8 quotes)

He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
Science quotes on:  |  Admiration (61)  |  Beautiful (271)  |  Being (1276)  |  Blur (8)  |  Boundary (55)  |  Cobra (2)  |  Completely (137)  |  Dissolve (22)  |  Face (214)  |  Finally (26)  |  Find (1014)  |  Form (976)  |  Goddess (9)  |  Hair (25)  |  Himself (461)  |  Human (1512)  |  Image (97)  |  Know (1538)  |  Life (1870)  |  Life Form (6)  |  Lose (165)  |  Moral (203)  |  Naked (10)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Negative (66)  |  Obscene (3)  |  Particle (200)  |  Prey (13)  |  Pull (43)  |  Reveal (152)  |  Revealed (59)  |  Saw (160)  |  See (1094)  |  Shape (77)  |  Snake (29)  |  Star (460)  |  Stare (9)  |  Tangle (8)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Virus (32)  |  White (132)  |  Wonder (251)  |  World (1850)

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.
— Richard Preston,
In Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge (2009), 33-34.
Science quotes on:  |  Equation (138)  |  Landscape (46)  |  Number (710)  |  Pi (14)  |  Stop (89)  |  Thread (36)  |  Train (118)

If you ask a person, “What were you thinking?” you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent. I try to see through people’s faces into their minds and listen through their words into their lives, and what I find there is beyond imagining.
— Richard Preston,
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Answer (389)  |  Ask (420)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Condition (362)  |  Face (214)  |  Find (1014)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Condition (6)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Invent (57)  |  Listen (81)  |  Live (650)  |  Mind (1377)  |  More (2558)  |  Novelist (9)  |  People (1031)  |  Person (366)  |  Reveal (152)  |  Rich (66)  |  See (1094)  |  Stream (83)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Thought (995)  |  Through (846)  |  Try (296)  |  Word (650)

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
Science quotes on:  |  Beneath (68)  |  Biology (232)  |  Clear (111)  |  Complicated (117)  |  Complication (30)  |  Deep (241)  |  Everything (489)  |  Find (1014)  |  Layer (41)  |  Mess (14)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Peel (6)  |  Simple (426)  |  Something (718)  |  Think (1122)  |  Understand (648)

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
Science quotes on:  |  Beauty (313)  |  Dissolve (22)  |  Extreme (78)  |  Imperceptibly (2)  |  Kind (564)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Obscenity (4)  |  See (1094)  |  Show (353)

The best way to know what’s in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.
— Richard Preston,
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Best (467)  |  Boil (24)  |  Know (1538)  |  Soup (10)  |  Way (1214)

Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it’s not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance.
— Richard Preston,
The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring
Science quotes on:  |  Circle (117)  |  Dance (35)  |  Different (595)  |  Endless (60)  |  Event (222)  |  Flow (89)  |  Forest (161)  |  Kind (564)  |  Link (48)  |  Motion (320)  |  Move (223)  |  Obvious (128)  |  Occur (151)  |  Precision (72)  |  Quality (139)  |  Time (1911)  |  Tree (269)

To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.
— Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone
Science quotes on:  |  Anthrax (2)  |  Better (493)  |  Die (94)  |  Easy (213)  |  Mess (14)  |  Safe (61)  |  Something (718)  |  Way (1214)  |  Work (1402)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
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