Alice Roberts > Quotes

“If you happen to be one of the people who has a split zygomaticus major muscle, where the lower part of it is tethered to the overlying skin, this will create a dimple in your cheek when you smile.”
― Alice Roberts, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us

“a human baby is born expecting culture just as a fish is born expecting water.”
― Alice Roberts, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us

“even been suggested that the eventual domestication of cereals in this area could have grown from a culture which invested heavily, not in bread-making, but in beer-brewing – and that alcohol could have flowed freely, greasing the wheels of social intercourse, at these ancient feasts.”
― Alice Roberts, Tamed: Ten Species That Changed Our World

“Perhaps the Romans were right to be wary of the formidable females of Britain -wise women, prophetesses, priestesses, Ladies, Queens; we'll never capture exactly how they saw themselves and how their communities saw them, but they appear charismatic, formidable, powerful even in death.”
― Alice Roberts, Ancestors: A History of Britain in Seven Burials

“Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words. Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character. Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny. Traditional Chinese, often attributed to Lao Tzu”
― Alice Roberts, The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy

“Our visits to museums, to gaze on such human remains, are a form of ancestor worship.”
― Alice Roberts

“Most chickens, though, grow fast – and are slaughtered at just six weeks old. When we eat chickens, they’re really just overblown, overgrown, big chicks. The ends of their bones haven’t even begun to turn from cartilage to bone yet. A single great-grandmother hen, back in the pedigree flock, can have an astonishing 3 million broiler-chicken descendants – who never make it to adulthood.”
― Alice Roberts, Tamed: Ten Species That Changed Our World

“they create a devastation and call it peace’.”
― Alice Roberts, The Celts: Search for a Civilization

“Our entire bodies and brains are made of a few dollars’ worth of common elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, enough calcium to whitewash a chicken coop, sufficient iron to make a two-inch nail, phosphorus to tip a good number of matches, enough sulphur to dust a flea-plagued dog, together with modest amounts of potassium, chlorine, magnesium and sodium. Assemble them all in the right proportion, build the whole into an intricate interacting system, and the result is our feeling, thinking, striving, imagining, creative selves. Such ordinary elements; such extraordinary results! James Hemming”
― Alice Roberts, The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy

“Entering the vestibule of Gough’s Cave today, a plastic skeleton lies on a sheet of plastic netting in the area where Cheddar Man was discovered. (The completeness of the ribcage and pelvis in displays like these – and indeed in any number of horror and adventure films – always irks me. When bodies rot, soft tissue – including cartilage and ligaments – decay. The ribs, once bound to the sternum by long rods of costal cartilage, then exist as separate bones, and collapse in a heap. The two bones of the pelvis eventually fall apart from each other at the front, where they were once joined by fibrocartilage, and away from the sacrum at the back, where the sacroiliac joint once existed. Plastic skeletons, with costal cartilages helping to keep the thorax three-dimensional, and complete pelves, abound in films, standing in for skeletons which really should be just bones. Now you know about this, it will irk you too.)”
― Alice Roberts, Ancestors: The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials

“they strung their great white wall from west to east – from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the River Tyne.”
― Alice Roberts, The Celts: Search for a Civilization

“I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African. He once wrote, ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto’ or ‘I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.’ Now there’s an identity worth holding on to. Kwame Anthony Appiah”
― Alice Roberts, The Little Book of Humanism: Universal lessons on finding purpose, meaning and joy

“Nor,’ he added, almost with a glint in his eye, ‘have I been disappointed.”
― Alice Roberts, Tamed: Ten Species That Changed Our World

“Tis the sublime of Man,
Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of a wondrous whole’ COLERIDGE At the end of this anatomical journey you can look at your hand and see not only something which developed out of a minute limb bud in your own developing embryo, but something which evolved from a fish’s fin, over millions of years and millions of generations.”
― Alice Roberts, The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us

“Humans have always been – as Rutherford so neatly encapsulates it – both ‘horny and mobile’.”
― Alice Roberts, Tamed: Ten Species That Changed Our World

“goddesses, and inscriptions telling us their names. For instance, Miranda Aldhouse-Green, an archaeologist who has studied Celtic iconography in depth, sees parallels between the Gallo-Roman horse goddess, Epona, widely worshipped across Europe, and a heroine in the Welsh tales, Rhiannon. The more local, named water-goddesses – Sulis at Bath, Coventina in Northumberland, Sequana in Burgundy – speak of the sacred nature of springs and rivers, which is well attested in the Celtic myths. The Irish myths are contained in three cycles”
― Alice Roberts, The Celts: Search for a Civilization

“In politically tense times, differences – rather than similarities – can easily be brought into sharp focus. And such differences can be exploited by any politician who ultimately cares more about their own power, or indeed some abstract idea of nationhood, than about the lives of ordinary people and the ordinary communities that they govern.”
― Alice Roberts, Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond