Richard Fortey > Quotes

“A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.”
― Richard Fortey

“Without death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I wonder if we are seeing a return to the object in the science-based museum. Since any visitor can go to a film like Jurassic Park and see dinosaurs reawakened more graphically than any museum could emulate, maybe a museum should be the place to have an encounter with the bony truth. Maybe some children have overdosed on simulations on their computers at home and just want to see something solid--a fact of life.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I confess that the idea of taking off one's boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.”
― Richard Fortey, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind

“Mankind is nothing more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate is clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.”
― Richard Fortey

“In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.”
― Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth

“Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either ‘primitive’ or ‘unsuccessful’? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long. There”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

“Quite soon my office was a jumble of broken bits of rocks, and needles, and old monographs, all coated in fine, limy dust. I still work in an identical office today. Tidy people's eyes go all peculiar when they come into it. I have a special small padded seat for them to collapse into.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"--I never did find out what that meant. ”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“I instinctively knew that naming was the first part of understanding. According to the Book of Genesis Adam named all the animals before Eve was created: evidently, the ancient scribes appreciated that taxonomy provides the key to grasping the world. Without such a foundation, humans wander blindly in an unstructured wilderness.”
― Richard Fortey, A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist

“Emus are little more than feathered stomachs borne on mighty legs and ruled by a tiny brain. If an emu wants one of your sandwiches, he will get it, and then run away. He cannot help you with your sudoku.”
― Richard Fortey, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind

“My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.’ They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

“It is not necessary to be large to be a perfectly good arthropod (or mollusc, come to that).”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution

“Little bits of Norwegian came to me by a kind of aural osmosis. The most surprising linguistic fact I learned was the impoverishment of that language in swear words. In fact, there is only one- 'farn'- which merely means something like 'devil take it!', but is considered very rude by a well brought-up Viking. It has to pass muster for most of the everyday tragedies that beset an expedition. If a finger is hammered, you jump up and down and cry 'farn'; if you drop an outstanding fossil irretrievably into the sea, you splutter for a while and then mutter 'farn' under your breath. If all your provisions were carried away by a hurricane and death were guaranteed, all the poor Norwegian could do would be to stand on the shingle and cry 'farn' into the wind. Somehow this does not seem adequate for the occasion.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“In the Spirit Building there are thousands upon thousands of jars containing fish or snake, octopus or lobster, pickled to the life. ... As you slide the doors back upon this pallid parade of containers and bottles your voice automatically loses decibels. You reflect: mortality, this is your sad face; you defy decay only as a ghastly pickle.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution

“There are lands of the imagination that cannot exist, but seem real; and there are lands that once existed that somehow seem remote and hard to credit. Perhaps their comparative solidity depends on the hand of a skilled writer. Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit, not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties: puffed up and monstrous in Brobdignag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns? Yet to travel back in time to the land of the Gonds - Gondwana - or to try to grasp the reality of Pangaea 250 million years ago seems to require a greater leap of imagination. But these places existed, as solid as Africa is today.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“Later . . . the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.”
― Richard Fortey, Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

“There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“our visuallydominated world sight is almost synonymous with understanding. We acknowledge light dawning by saying: ‘I see!’ The metaphor of vision suffuses our attempts to convey comprehension: we bring issues into focus, we clarify our views, we sight our objectives, we look into things. We accept the evidence of our own eyes. The conjurer turns the veracity of sight head over heels: now you see it—now you don’t. We find his tricks disturbing because we are so wedded to the truth of sight.”
― Richard Fortey, Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution