Natalie Angier Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

The mere ability to replicate is hardly cause for a standing ovation. Bacteria will double their number every twenty minutes. Many cancer cells can divide in a dish for years after their founder tumors have killed the patient. Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much.

Natalie Angier
The beauty of the natural world lies in the details, and most of those details are not the stuff of calendar art.

Natalie Angier
Truth is the same thing to Understanding, as Music to the Ear, and Beauty to the Eye.

Natalie Angier
If there is any lesson I have learned in my years of following science, it is that nothing is as it seems. Instead, things are as they seem plus the details you are just beginning to notice. New truths rarely overturn old ones, they simply add nuanced brushstrokes to the portrait.

Natalie Angier
Whatever else I might have thought of [President George W] Bush's call, with its assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it's clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

Natalie Angier
If the link between testosterone and aggressive or dominant behavior in men is a mess, that for women is the floor under your refrigerator: you don't want to think about it.

Natalie Angier
Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

Natalie Angier
You have your opinion, I have mine, and it takes all kinds of nuts and dips to make a party, right?

Natalie Angier
If you are or ever have been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news.

Natalie Angier
Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up — wearing top hat and tails, of course.

Natalie Angier
Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile. They look into the midnight sky and ask big questions, just as we did when we were in college: Who are we? Where do we come from? And why are we standing around outside on the night before finals, do we want to end up making elevator parts for a living like our father or what?

Natalie Angier
The acidity of the vagina in health is just about that of a glass of red wine. This is the vagina that sings; this is the vagina with bouquet, with legs.

Natalie Angier
Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked.

Natalie Angier
I believe that we can learn from other species, and from our pasts, and from our parts.... My book sets out to tackle the question 'What makes a woman'. I hope simply to show how the body is part of the answer, is a map to meaning and freedom.

Natalie Angier
I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me.

Natalie Angier
We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?

Natalie Angier
Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

Natalie Angier
Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.

Natalie Angier
Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of competitive behavior. But the depth and breadth of human altruism, the willingness to forgo immediate personal gain for the long-term common good, far exceeds behaviors seen even in other large-brained highly social species like chimpanzees and dolphins, and it has as such been difficult to understand.

Natalie Angier
I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.

Natalie Angier
Nature is a tenacious recycler, every dung heap and fallen redwood tree a bustling community of saprophytes wresting life from the dead and discarded, as though intuitively aware that there is nothing new under the sun. Throughout the physical world, from the cosmic to the subatomic, the same refrain resounds. Conservation: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.

Natalie Angier
Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

Natalie Angier
Scientists... resist... making more of the data than the data make of themselves.

Natalie Angier
What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.

Natalie Angier
Evolution is a tinkerer, an ad-hocker, and a jury-rigger. It works with what it has on hand, not with what it has in mind. Some of its inventions prove elegant, while in others you can see the seams and dried glue.

Natalie Angier
Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.

Natalie Angier