Henry Fairfield Osborn Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

This chain of human ancestors was totally unknown to Darwin. He could not have even dreamed of such a flood of proof and truth.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
The all-round liberally educated man, from Palaeolithic times to the time when the earth shall become a cold cinder, will always be the same, namely, the man who follows his standards of truth and beauty, who employs his learning and observation, his reason, his expression, for purposes of production, that is, to add something of his own to the stock of the world's ideas.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
We have to be reminded over and over again that Nature is full of paradoxes.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer — this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. Not quantity but quality must be the aim in the development of each nation, to make men fit to maintain their places in the struggle for existence. We must be concerned above all with racial values; every race must seek out and develop and improve its own racial characteristics. Racial consciousness is not pride of race, but proper respect for the Purity of race is today found in but one nation — the Scandinavian.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
But the voice of anatomy, like the voice of all nature, never reaches the mental ear of the Great Commoner. It is the novel province of anatomy to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the structure, the origin and the history of man.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
Tyrannosaurus is the most superb carnivorous mechanism among the terrestrial Vertebrata, in which raptorial power and speed are combined.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
His speculations were as unsound as his observations had been sound and valuable.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
I am perhaps more proud of having helped to redeem the character of the cave-man than of any other single achievement of mine in the field of anthropology.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
[The] great battle for preservation and conservation cannot be won by gentle tones, nor by appeals to the aesthetic instincts of those who have no sense of beauty, or enjoyment of Nature.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
In truth, from the period of the earliest stages of Greek thought man has been eager to discover some natural cause of evolution, and to abandon the idea of supernatural intervention in the order of nature.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
As in every other branch of science, problems multiply like the heads of hydra; no sooner is one laid low than a number of new ones appear; yet we stand on the shoulders of preceding generations, so that if our philosophical vision be correct, we gain a wider horizon, while the horizon itself is constantly expanding by discovery.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
There is no risk in making the flat statement that in a world devoid of other living creatures, man himself would die. This fact — call it a theory if you will — is far more provable than the accepted theory of relativity. Involved in it is, in truth, another kind of principle of relativity — the relatedness of all living things.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
The hunter of wild game is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals to life.

Henry Fairfield Osborn