Zoologist

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Let the noble man Be generous and good, Tirelessly achieving What is just and useful: Let him be a model For those beings whom he surmises."

Peter Kropotkin

Philosophy

anarchism

1842–1921

"The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all."

🇬🇧Richard Dawkins

Science

atheism

b. 1941

"Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection."

🇨🇭Jean Piaget

Philosophy

1896–1980

"The Moral Judgment of the Child translation by Marjorie Gabain from Archive.org"

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

🇺🇸Vladimir Nabokov

Literature

modernism

1912–1977

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Leonardo da Vinci

Mathematics

Renaissance

1452–1519

"Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie."

"Dr. Alexander Skutch - Bibliographic notes from Tropical Science Center"

🇺🇸Edwin Grant Conklin

Science

1863–1952

"National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir by E. Newton Harvey, 1958"

🇺🇸John James Audubon

Science

Naturalism

1785–1851

"Louise Hauss and David Brent Miller Audubon Collection", Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, Auburn University"

"Nicolaus Copernicus is the supreme example of a man who revolutionized science by looking at the old facts in a new way."

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

🇺🇸Frans de Waal

Literature

1948–2024

"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."

"“...from its name, Ramgar, I am inclined to support that it was a part of the building actually erected by Rama."

🇫🇷Georges Cuvier

Science

1769–1832

"It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them."

🇺🇸May Berenbaum

Education

b. 1953

"Scientific knowledge helps people to understand and appreciate the world and all of its complexities; it’s the best insurance against irrational fear."

🇺🇸L. David Mech

Science

b. 1937

"It is beyond ridiculous that wolves need to study a human or that they are capable of it."

🇯🇵Hirohito

Economics

1901–1989

"when there is no other option than to lose our own people, the best option is to fight to the very end."

🇫🇮Erkki Pulliainen

Science

1938–2022

"Lehtomäki has to be put on a round-the-clock supervision. She is more interested in destroying than protecting the nature."

🇺🇸Roman Vishniac

Art

1897–1990

"the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry. -- Leon Wieseltier, editor of The New Republic"

August Krogh

Education

1874–1949

"For a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice or a few such animals on which it can be most conveniently studied."

Richard Owen

Science

1804–1892

"Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another."

🇺🇸George Gaylord Simpson

Science

1902–1984

"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

🇺🇸David G. Haskell

Literature

b. 1950

"The skin is impossibly wet, a cloud condensed into animate matter."

🇺🇸PZ Myers

Science

b. 1957

"I have been told that my position won't win the creationist court cases. Do you think I care? I didn't become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers. The word for people who are neutral about truth is "liars."

🇬🇧John Maynard Smith

Science

1920–2004

"Evolutionary game theory is a way of thinking about evolution at the phenotypic level when the fitnesses of particular phenotypes depend on their frequencies in the population."

🇺🇸James Dwight Dana

Science

1813–1895

"The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word."

🇬🇧Alfred Russel Wallace

Science

1823–1913

"Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species."

🇬🇧Desmond Morris

Art

Surrealism

b. 1928

"The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo."

"I had jars in my bedroom, much to the chagrin of my mother, you couldn't throw away a mayonnaise jar in my house. That was a specimen jar."

Harry Johnston

Art

1858–1927

"Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable."

🇬🇧Richard Francis Burton

Military

1821–1890

"The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own."