Marston Bates Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

I think there would be advantages if all adults retained something of the questioning attitude, if their curiosity were less easily satisfied by dogma.

Marston Bates
We have come to look at our planet as a resource for our species, which is funny when you think that the planet has been around for about five billion years, and Homo sapiens for perhaps one hundred thousand. We have acquired an arrogance about ourselves that I find frightening. We have come to feel that we are so far apart from the rest of nature that we have but to command.

Marston Bates
The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography.

Marston Bates
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

Marston Bates
Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants — of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.

Marston Bates
The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual — of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities.

Marston Bates
Man's point of view is curiously different in the forest and in the sea. In the forest he is a bottom animal, in the sea a surface animal.

Marston Bates
We remain important, you and I and all mankind. But so is the butterfly — not because it is good for food or good for making medicine or bad because it eats our orange trees. It is important in itself, as a part of the economy of nature.

Marston Bates
Science has put man in his place; one among the millions of kinds of living things crawling around on the surface of a minor planet circling a trivial star.

Marston Bates
In defying nature, in destroying nature, in building an arrogantly selfish, man-centered, artificial world, I do not see how man can gain peace or freedom or joy.

Marston Bates
Life in both the forest and the sea is distributed in horizontal layers.

Marston Bates
We think of death from old age as "natural death" and we thus come across the paradox that natural death is uncommon in nature, unnatural.

Marston Bates
There has, in fact, been so much contact through migrations and other types of population movements, that the anthropologists are unable to come to much agreement in attempts to classify man into subspecies (or races). Their problem is much like that of the botanists faced with the North American blackberries.

Marston Bates
Most technical names still have a queer, foreign, pedantic sound, and if we see very many of them in a stretch of print we get frightened off and hastily look for something else to read.

Marston Bates