Top 70 Richard Preston Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.”

— Richard Preston

2. “The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.”

— Richard Preston

3. “You can’t fight off Ebola the way you fight off a cold. Ebola does in ten days what it takes AIDS ten years to accomplish.”

— Richard Preston

4. “In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.”

— Richard Preston

5. “If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.”

— Richard Preston

6. “To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.”

— Richard Preston

7. “Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.”

— Richard Preston

8. “During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight as they move through the green depths of the canopy, like schools of fish.”

— Richard Preston

9. “When people asked him why he didn’t work with those viruses, he replied, I don’t particularly feel like dying.”

— Richard Preston

10. “What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life – the necessity to love.”

— Richard Preston

11. “In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple. This emerging virus was ike a bat crossing the sky at evening. Just when you thought you saw it flicker through your field of view, it was gone.”

— Richard Preston

12. “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day – Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly.”

— Richard Preston

13. “Suddenly he goes into the last phase – the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has “crashed and bled out.” Or more politely they say that the victim has “gone down.”

— Richard Preston

14. “It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.”

— Richard Preston

15. “He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.”

— Richard Preston

16. “My virologist friends are always bioengineering viruses. I could see a bioengineered strain of smallpox getting into a terrorist’s hands, and that’s my fear. And then when we get a terrorist attack with smallpox, and the smallpox doesn’t respond to the vaccine, we’re in trouble.”

— Richard Preston

17. “Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.”

— Richard Preston

18. “The virus transformed the hospital at Maridi into a morgue. As it jumped from bed to bed, killing patients left and right, doctors began to notice signs of mental derangement, psychosis, depersonalization, zombie-like behavior. Some of the dying stripped off their clothes and ran out of the hospital, naked and bleeding, and wandered through the streets of the town, seeking their homes, not seeming to know what had happened or how they had gotten into this condition.”

— Richard Preston

19. “The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down with Ebola Zaire die of it. Ebola Zaire is a slate wiper in humans.”

— Richard Preston

20. “Isn’t it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty.”

— Richard Preston

21. “A policy of moving out and doing it, and asking forgiveness afterward, is much better than a policy of asking permission and having it denied.”

— Richard Preston

22. “Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster.”

— Richard Preston

23. “The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity – not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.”

— Richard Preston

24. “The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human – the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.”

— Richard Preston

25. “We don’t really know what Ebola has done in the past, and we don’t know what it might do in the future.”

— Richard Preston

26. “The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that would scare the daylights out of a military biohazard specialist. The.”

— Richard Preston

27. “Poxviruses keep herds and swarms of living things in check, preventing them from growing too large and overwhelming their habitats. Viruses are an essential part of nature. If all the viruses on the planet were to disappear, a global catastrophe would ensue, and the natural ecosystems of the earth would collapse in a spectacular crash under burgeoning populations of insects. Viruses are nature’s crowd control, and a poxvirus can thin a crowd in a hurry.”

— Richard Preston

28. “Here are the names of some emerging viruses: Lassa. Rift Valley. Oropouche. Rocio. Q. Guanarito. VEE. Monkeypox. Dengue. Chikungunya. The hantaviruses. Machupo. Junin. The rabieslike strains Mokola and Duvenhage. LeDantec. The Kyasanur Forest brain virus.”

— Richard Preston

29. “The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue.”

— Richard Preston

30. “Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands – literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue.”

— Richard Preston

31. “Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses – how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth.”

— Richard Preston

32. “The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War.”

— Richard Preston

33. “The best way to know what’s in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.”

— Richard Preston

34. “A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus – deformed and unable to replicate very well.”

— Richard Preston

35. “In 1986 – the year before Peter Cardinal died – Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of the expedition to wear breathing apparatus inside the cave.”

— Richard Preston

36. “The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.”

— Richard Preston

37. “There may be ten million different species on the earth, or a hundred million species. The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don’t have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.”

— Richard Preston

38. “Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.”

— Richard Preston

39. “An amount of bot tox the size of the dot over this i would be enough to easily kill ten people. Bot tox is a nerve agent. It is one hundred thousand times more toxic than Sarin, the nerve gas that the Aum Shinrikyo sect released in the Tokyo subway.”

— Richard Preston

40. “The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.”

— Richard Preston

41. “The team had discovered the red chamber of the virus at the end of the earth, where the life form had amplified through mothers and their unborn children.”

— Richard Preston

42. “He calls it speleogenesis by elephants – the creation of a cave by elephants.”

— Richard Preston

43. “Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen, including the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity onearth.”

— Richard Preston

44. “Nobody knows the ages of any of the living giant coast redwoods, because nobody has ever drilled into one of them in order to count its annual growth rings. Drilling into an old redwood would not reveal its age, anyway, because the oldest redwoods seem to be hollow; they don’t have growth rings left in their centers to be counted. Botanists suspect that the oldest living redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old-they seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon.”

— Richard Preston

45. “The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.”

— Richard Preston

46. “Epidemiologists think that smallpox killed roughly one billion people during its last hundred years of activity on earth.”

— Richard Preston

47. “I know you have this idea that a surgical mask and gown are all you need to handle an Ebola patient, but I think you need to use a higher level of containment,” and he offered to pick up the sick man in an Army ambulance – put him in an Army biocontainment pod – and carry the pod to the Army’s facilities at the Institute.”

— Richard Preston

48. “Lake of the Woods is asleep for the winter, but it is dreaming. Marie feels that she can hear the dreams of the lake running through the ice, like thoughts in a language we don’t know.”

— Richard Preston

49. “He leaped for a ladder and climbed it like a chimpanzee being chased by a cloud of hornets from hell, dropping his gun in the process.”

— Richard Preston

50. “This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey.”

— Richard Preston