Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks.
— Richard Preston
There may be a little bit of finger-pointing - there always is in a situation like this - but I think of Ebola as an act of nature. It's the biological equivalent of a tsunami, and yes, we are having trouble handling it.
Watergate was a third-rate burglary. It was purely domestic in nature.
— Richard Painter
There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.
— Richard P. Feynman
I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention - it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
It is the nature of the business that you work unsociable, unpredictable hours and can get called away at a moment's notice to somewhere on the other side of the world. This can put a strain on home and personal life.
— Richard McCabe
Saying 'I'm wrong' is meaningless unless it comes from our heart, not just our lips. That often requires a genuine and profound change within ourselves, because we need to realize it's simply human nature and that everyone makes mistakes.
— Richard M. DeVos
No other youth group like the Scouts has trained so many future leaders while at the same time being a nature organization with its outdoor focus.
— Richard Louv
By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.
A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.'
Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.
— Richard Linklater
We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man.
— Richard Le Gallienne
Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.
My true nature, I believe, is writing.
— Richard LaGravenese
The battle over genetically modified crops is rife with business interests and political opportunism. When GMOs were first produced in laboratories around the world, they were rightly heralded as a tremendous leap forward in our ability to supplement nature by providing high-nutrient foods.
— Richard J. Roberts
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
— Richard Engel
Whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.
As life forms, viruses are just inherently interesting. It's the microworld - this universe of life too small for us to see - but it's profoundly complicated, and immensely powerful. Ebola is like a beautiful and frightening predator. There is a wonder in the operations of nature that can't be denied, even when we're the losers.
Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.
See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations.
— Richard Owen
To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's only because we haven't been able to understand it yet.
— Richard Matheson
Now, more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent.
We are telling our kids that nature is in the past and it probably doesn't count anymore, the future is in electronics, the boogeyman is in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.
When you're sitting in front of a screen, you're not using all of your senses at the same time. Nowhere than in nature do kids use their senses in such a stimulated way.
It's easy to blame the nature-deficit disorder on the kids' or the parents' back, but they also need the help of urban planners, schools, libraries and other community agents to find nature that's accessible.
I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.
Though actually the work of man's hands - or, more properly speaking, the work of his travelling feet, - roads have long since come to seem so much a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the landscape no less natural than rocks and trees.
Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road.
The lover of nature has the highest art in his soul.
— Richard Jefferies
It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.
— Richard Hell
Nothing. We're all friends and friendly. So when the cameras go down, depending on the mood or the nature of the material we're dealing with, there's usually a kind of a prevailing light attitude that's floating around.
— Richard Dean Anderson
I think we sometimes give ourselves a little too much credit as humans, as being able to control and understand nature, when in fact we do neither.
I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe.
— Richard Pousette-Dart
The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.
Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature.
In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
— Richard M. Nixon
Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.
We tend to block off many of our senses when we're staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.
Our kids are actually doing what we told them to do when they sit in front of that TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. The society is telling kids unconsciously that nature's in the past. It really doesn't count anymore, that the future is in electronics, and besides, the bogeyman is in the woods.
There's a generation now that didn't grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don't know where to start.
The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
God is not an American. Nature did not design Americans to be prosperous forever.
— Richard Lamm
This sunlight linked me through the ages to that past consciousness.
I wanted to understand the secrets behind my chemical experiments and behind the processes in nature.
— Richard Ernst
