Stefan Bechtel > Quotes

“A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, and then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

“During the first two days of travel north of Miles City, in a country tht was custom-made for pronghorn antelope, they did not see a single one; the only living creatures they saw were prairie dogs, rabbits, and turkey vultures, wheeling high overhead as if scouting for the last meal in Montana. It was forlorn, abandoned country, a country of great absences, which had once been filled by the dust and noise and dung of one of the planet's greatest zoological spectacles but ws now almost completely silent.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

“Doyle was not alone in his growing disenchantment with the deadness, the self-aggrandizing, self-appointed hierarchy that ran the shop, and the scorn for other religions that seemed to characterize the Catholic Church. In fact, scholars have observed that one of the driving forces behind the emergence of the new “religion” called spiritualism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras was loss of faith in organized religion.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Quest to Solve The Greatest Mystery of All

“Suddenly, you could find yourself trapped and alone, in a situation that was out of control. It was like being trapped in a cage with an angry bear—in fact, the most dangerous part of a tornado was often referred to as the bear’s cage. And it could all happen in the blink of an eye. Even so, Tim kept trying to pilot the van closer and closer to the storm.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Tornado Hunter: Getting Inside the Most Violent Storms on Earth

“Science depends on being able to repeat a finding, again and again, before it's declared true. It's about controlling the variables. And that is simply impossible in a séance room. Results are never replicable, strictly. The experimenter isn't in charge. Even the medium isn't in charge. The spirits decide if and when they'll come through, and what they'll do when they get here.”
― Stefan Bechtel, Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All