My time as an undergraduate at Birmingham was extremely stimulating both as a biologist and also for my more general intellectual development.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

The Dalmatian breed of dog has many primitive characteristics.

Better understanding of the natural world not only enhances all of us as human beings, but can also be harnessed for the better good, leading to improved health and quality of life.

I put a bullet into the back of the crocodile’s neck just behind the head, thus killing it. If a crocodile is hit in any other part of its anatomy it disappears into the water...

Basically, I have been compelled by curiosity.

I was never very good at exams, having a poor memory and finding the examination process rather artificial, and there never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me.

I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me-the biggest python I had...

We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.

Scientific understanding is often beautiful, a profoundly aesthetic experience which gives pleasure not unlike the reading of a great poem.

The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us.

The Foxhall jaw has now been missing for many years.

During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky.

Although we followed that hyena for the best part of half an hour, we never caught up with it.

I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.

In fact I am very much an experimentalist and an empiricist, so it would have been a major mistake for me to have abandoned this type of work.

I withdrew my support for the validity of the evidence for early Pleistocene Stone Age tools in Europe on the grounds of not proven.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

Therefore, I reasoned that study of the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells was important and might even be illuminating about the nature of life.

Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.

The majority of people in Angola were not provided with any kind of schooling and were completely illiterate, very badly paid, and treated almost as slaves.

I am still a keen mountain walker and an enthusiastic glider pilot.

At Olduvai, for 20 years, Mary and I had investigated and made a general survey of the overall geology.

I had never passed a single school exam, and clearly never would.

It has been a privilege to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to see how it might help mankind in more practical ways.

Most Kikuyu marriages were arranged on the basis of what is described by anthropologists as the bride price.

By shading off, as I have done, the portion of the area of the diagram according to the individual age, every one may see how much of life is consumed, and what is left.

This meant that when I left school I had to work as a technician in a microbiological laboratory associated with the local Guinness brewery.

My father John A. Ryle was a doctor who, after the war, was appointed to the first Chair of Social Medicine at Oxford University.

The trip I made to Angola to study the prehistoric contents of the gravel beds as a means of deciding the age of the deposits and their economic potential was the first time prehistory had...

I decided that the University of Sussex in Brighton was a good place for this work because it had a strong tradition in bacterial molecular genetics and an excellent reputation in biology.

Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

I never felt interpretation was my job.

It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.

Our water hole at the camp was little more than a liquid, muddy swamp, in which a rhino wallowed daily and added urine to the puddle.

For a deeper interest in the Moon than I ever felt before.

This possibility bothered me as I thought it was not advisable to remain in one academic environment, and the long dark winters in Edinburgh could be rather dismal.

During the war years I worked on the development of radar and other radio systems for the R.A.F. and, though gaining much in engineering experience and in understanding people, rapidly forgot most of the physics...

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

I enjoyed my time at primary school because my teachers made the world seem such an interesting place and encouraged my innate curiosity.

During our first night in the new camp a number of lions came round to investigate. The lions contented themselves by roaring at us.

I think it’s the most important find in view of human evolution. I was really looking for tools, but we never found any at the site.

It was now 1980 and Anne and myself had two little children Sarah and Emily, and we were wondering whether to stay permanently in Edinburgh.

Raising funds for my fourth expedition proved to be very difficult.

It is a pleasure to me to run up to London and enjoy the collections at the National Gallery, South Kensington, and the Royal Academy.

This progress in the molecular analysis of the cell cycle led to more interest being taken in my work and as a consequence to greater competition.