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Top 15 Richard Fortey Quotes (2025 Update)

Richard Fortey Quote: “I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.”

1. “I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Emus are little more than feathered stomachs borne on mighty legs and ruled by a tiny brain. If an emu wants one of your sandwiches, he will get it, and then run away. He cannot help you with your sudoku.”

2. “Emus are little more than feathered stomachs borne on mighty legs and ruled by a tiny brain. If an emu wants one of your sandwiches, he will get it, and then run away. He cannot help you with your sudoku.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.”

3. “A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.”

4. “You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Mankind is nothing more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate is clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.”

5. “Mankind is nothing more than a parasitic tick gorging himself on temporary plenty while the seas are low and the climate is clement. But the present arrangement of land and sea will change, and with it our brief supremacy.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.”

6. “In the beginning there was dust, and one day the great, improbable experiment of life will return to dust. We are not secure. Just as our ultimate genesis was entangled with the birth of suns, and the terrifying tumult of asteroids and meteorites, so we are still bound to the cosmos.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.’ They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One.”

7. “When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.’ They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Quite soon my office was a jumble of broken bits of rocks, and needles, and old monographs, all coated in fine, limy dust. I still work in an identical office today. Tidy people’s eyes go all peculiar when they come into it. I have a special small padded seat for them to collapse into.”

8. “Quite soon my office was a jumble of broken bits of rocks, and needles, and old monographs, all coated in fine, limy dust. I still work in an identical office today. Tidy people’s eyes go all peculiar when they come into it. I have a special small padded seat for them to collapse into.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either ‘primitive’ or ‘unsuccessful’? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long. There.”

9. “Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either ‘primitive’ or ‘unsuccessful’? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long. There.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.”

10. “I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”

11. “Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “I confess that the idea of taking off one’s boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.”

12. “I confess that the idea of taking off one’s boots in a howling squall to safeguard fossils that had survived since the Precambrian had its funny side.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.”

13. “Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a part of the world.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.”

14. “There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”

15. “But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”

16. “The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “I instinctively knew that naming was the first part of understanding. According to the Book of Genesis Adam named all the animals before Eve was created: evidently, the ancient scribes appreciated that taxonomy provides the key to grasping the world. Without such a foundation, humans wander blindly in an unstructured wilderness.”

17. “I instinctively knew that naming was the first part of understanding. According to the Book of Genesis Adam named all the animals before Eve was created: evidently, the ancient scribes appreciated that taxonomy provides the key to grasping the world. Without such a foundation, humans wander blindly in an unstructured wilderness.”

— Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey Quote: “There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.”

18. “There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.”

— Richard Fortey

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