Richard Preston Quotes

Maybe we should admit that our science is not as perfect as we would like to believe and that nature is ultimately inexplicable and beyond our control.

We kid ourselves that we're trying to be empathetic with the human condition from a distance, but I don't think that is it at all. It's stupid; it's a waste of time. But when the earth flexes its muscles, that's rather different. That's a powerful reminder of where we are.

I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.

Some may say that such a girl is not ready for a relationship with a man, especially a man in his late sixties. But to that I say: We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love. I wouldn't force her. I wouldn't have to. She would want me. We would be in love. What do you know. You don't know anything. Call me when you've cured AIDS, give me a ring then and I'll listen.

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.

No man is infallible.

The earth is such a voluminous, sparse, wild place that has its own rhythm that human beings try to control and strategize our way around, but the truth is, if you're out someplace like the ocean on a capsized boat, it doesn't matter if you have academic degrees, or if you're a martial-arts ninja. Nature is a bigger force than you.

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Nobody is completely perfect.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even known they had done so.

Seems you can't outsmart Mother Nature.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

No mortal man, moreover is wise at all moments.

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

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.

You will not dishonor the divine perfections by judgments unworthy of them, provided you never judge of Him by yourself, provided you do not ascribe to the Creator the imperfections and limitations of created beings.

A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.

Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.

There are two things that are infinite: The universe and human folly. And sometimes I am not sure about the universe.