Matt Ridley Quotes

I never wanted to be a scientist per se. I wanted to be a naturalist.

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

For me, the study of these laws is inseparable from a love of Nature in all its manifestations.

Becoming a bird ecologist was just luck! I had the chance to be a field assistant for a scientist working in the Galapagos Islands, and while I was there, I saw a particular problem in behavioral biology that I wanted to solve and, in the process, made myself into a bird ecologist.

I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of.

If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

In my youth, I spent my time investigating insects.

Study nature, not books.

I'm a big fan of David Attenborough, who I think is the most adventurous of the nature program presenters.

I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

It was probably my parents who inspired me most. My father was a scientist and answered my scientific questions, while my mother took me on walks and showed me birds and plants. She also took me out at night and showed me the constellations and the aurora.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.

I spent my childhood in northern New York State, and like many kids, bugs and other critters fascinated me.

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history.

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

I liked natural history. I liked the outdoors. And I found the sea quite interesting.

I was the kind of kid who liked omnivorously almost all kinds of science - rock collections, fossils - and I like leaves, I like plants, and I like biology.