Edward Dolnick > Quotes

“The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“Mary Anning, sister of the above, Who died March the 9th, 1847, Aged 47 years.” The grave perches at the edge of the sea, nestled near the cliffs that Anning knew so well. Visitors leave flowers and seashells, and, sometimes, a toy dinosaur or two.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The men had two favorite modes of speech, wild exaggeration and ludicrous understatement. Ideally, both were delivered deadpan. Time and again, the accounts overflow with an offhand vitality that reminds us that we are listening to Mark Twain's contemporaries.”
― Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon

“So in theory someone might have shouted “Dinosaur!” many centuries before the 1800s. But that’s unlikely, because discovering is not merely finding something; discovering is finding and understanding that you’ve found something.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“In 2010, the Royal Society, the world’s best-known scientific organization, put together a list of the ten most influential women in the history of British science. Anning turns up there, along with such notables as Rosalind Franklin, of DNA fame.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Only one story—the story of the dinosaurs themselves—had a happy ending. Happy in comparison, at any rate. Dinosaurs will be famous forever, first of all, and, what is more important, they were granted an enviable finale. Dinosaurs reigned unchallenged for an unimaginable one hundred million years. Then, in a cataclysm that reverberated around the globe, with no warning, no foreboding, no lingering, they vanished.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Darwin detonated his bombshell, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. The basic idea was simple. There are not enough seats at the table.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“The bottom line is stark. Ninety-nine percent of all the animal species that ever lived—not individuals but species—leave no trace whatever. The biologist Jerry Coyne once observed that paleontology is one of the few fields—theology is another—“ in which the students far outnumber the objects of study.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“In the century of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton,” one historian wrote, “the most versatile genius of all was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“The upshot is that the huge majority of fossils—99 percent of all the fossils ever found—come from sea creatures like sharks and shellfish. But the other 1 percent includes many of the creatures we care about the most. Dinosaurs were the most conspicuous one-percenters. They lived on land, which means that we’ve lost nearly all evidence that they ever lived at all. Out of every eighty million Tyrannosaurus rexes, scientists calculate, only one was ever fossilized. (The total number of T. rexes in museums around the world is around three dozen.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Even supremely able and ambitious men quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers. "When one ... compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet who had compiled an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“By the early 1850s, scientists were in an exultant mood. Geologists and paleontologists could point to half a century of accomplishment. Starting from nowhere—the word geology did not even exist until 1795, and paleontology not until 1833—scientists had racked up triumph after triumph. They had discovered reams of fossils, they had resurrected creatures beyond counting, they had flung open the gates of time, they had fought down their own religious doubts and dispatched their fundamentalist rivals. The time had come to celebrate.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“We know that we have got about 2500 ft. to fall yet . . . and if it comes all in the first hundred miles we shan’t be dreading rapids afterwards for if it should continue at this rate much more than a hundred miles we should have to go the rest of the way up hill which is not often the case with rivers.”
― Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon

“A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

“The shift from God as mathematician to God as artist opened a door. Science grew more inviting.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Especially riches pulled from the ground. Two-thirds of all American workers labored on farms, with sweat and muscle the only fuels. “There was no quittin’ time and no startin’ time,” a folk proverb declared. “It was all the time.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853

“many puzzle pieces had been picked up, admired for their handsome appearance, and then put to one side because no one recognized that they had any special significance. (A clue is not a clue until someone sees a mystery.)”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Here, too, he went out of his way to praise the very thing that should have set off alarms—the painting looked peculiarly modern. For forgers, the greatest stylistic challenge is time-travel. Artists and writers of every generation leave behind countless subconscious signs that reveal the era when they lived and worked.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“There were, in fact, two problems with fossils. First, they were made of the wrong thing—rock rather than bone or shell or wood. (The dinosaur “bones” in museums around the world are rock, not bone.) Second, they showed up in the wrong places—fossilized fish turned up inside solid rock; fossilized seashells turned up atop mountain peaks.”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren tried to impersonate Vermeer. He failed, and that failure was the key to his success.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Vermeer died in 1675. Bakelite never existed until its creation, in a laboratory, in 1907. Van Meegeren fooled the world with a seventeenth-century painting made of plastic.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“For religious believers—and the nineteenth century was a devout age—everything to do with dinosaurs and the depths of time spurred anxiety and confusion. It seemed nearly impossible to reconcile these new notions with biblical teachings. How to make sense of eons of time when Genesis fit all of creation into a mere six days?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

“Vivant Denon, an artist and writer whose drawings”
― Edward Dolnick, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone

“In Van Meegeren’s day, and today as well, the experts like nothing better than to ridicule their rivals by showcasing their errors in judgment, preferably in a tone of mock bewilderment. “Gratuitous nastiness is part of the art historian’s weaponry,” observes Christopher Wright, himself a veteran of many duels at dawn.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Until the advent of metal tubes for paint, invented in 1841, an artist’s studio looked like a cross between an apothecary shop and a natural history museum.*”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“if the painting is that bad, how did Giltaij’s predecessors get the story so wrong? And not only did they get it wrong, but they got it wrong time after time. Emmaus was only the first of six forged Vermeers that Van Meegeren sold between 1937 and 1943. He grew increasingly sloppy and careless through the years—why wouldn’t he, since even the crudest fraud brought him millions?—and each new painting was uglier than its predecessors. “They sold just the same,” Van Meegeren would later marvel, and they sold at once, and nearly every one brought in even more money than Emmaus had.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“The dinosaur discoveries came out of nowhere, like the asteroid, and the public in the nineteenth century was scarcely better prepared than the dinosaurs had been. It was not just that such things as monstrous skeletons were contrary to experience. The shock was that they were contrary to reason. Such things could not be, because they had no place in a world that was, everyone knew, under divine supervision. Why would God have indulged in such follies?”
― Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World