Quotes by Richard Preston

“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. Epidemi...”

“we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart”

“Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into ...”

“We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, an...”

“Experiments suggest that if one particle of Ebola enters a person's bloodstream, it can cause a fatal infection. This may explain why many of the medical workers who came down with Ebola couldn't r...”

“If a vaccine works, then the vaccinators might conceivably set up what's known as ring vaccinations around Ebola hot spots. In this technique, medical workers simply vaccinate everybody in a ring, ...”

“Redwoods flourish in fog, but they don't like salt air. They tend to appear in valleys that are just out of sight of the sea. In their relationship with the sea, redwoods are like cats that long to...”

“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 the concrete all ...”

“The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree ...”

“... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.”

“The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in...”

“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 ...”

“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. Natu...”

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

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

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

“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 the concrete all ...”

“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 diame...”