Robert T. Bakker quote: “No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a…”

“Twentieth-century paleontologists have fallen into the bad habit of reconstructing the dinosaurs' life functions by using crocodiles as a living model. But the earliest researchers of the nineteenth century proved beyond a doubt that the dinosaurs' powerful hind limbs must have operated like the limbs of gigantic birds.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 20
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

“Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule — always do what's most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down.

“… if you saw a baby tyrannosaur you would probably think it was a weird looking bird. A full grown one might have had feathers too, maybe not on its whole body though, maybe more of an ornamental display sort of feathers. So traits in the theropod dinosaurs were more birdlike than say, crocodiles.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

“Really the best way to understand anything about dinosaurs is by looking at living animals. You look at birds and then look at the closest living ancestor of birds, which is the crocodile. If you look at characteristics that birds and crocodiles have in common, the explanation is that the trait was in the common ancestor that birds and crocodiles had at one time.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

“No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30.
Criticism

“… if you look at crocodiles today, they aren’t really representative of what the lineage of crocodiles look like. Crocodiles are represented by about 23 species, plus or minus a couple. Along that lineage the more primitive members weren’t aquatic. A lot of them were bipedal, a lot of them looked like little dinosaurs. Some were armored, others had no teeth. They were all fully terrestrial. So this is just the last vestige of that radiation that we’re seeing. And the ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles would have, to the untrained eye, looked much more like a dinosaur.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted in "How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations" http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/t-rexxx-how-dinosaurs-lived-loved-and-tasted-q-a-with-dr-mark-norell-american-museum-of-natural-history, Vice (March 20, 2012)

“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Of course we all know that the human race has historically done better during warm periods. While we've seen a slight warming in the last century, we've also seen a worldwide improvement in the human condition. Warm – what's not to like?”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The Deadliest U.S. Natural Hazard: Extreme Cold http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/18/the-deadliest-us-natural-hazard-extreme-cold/ December 18, 2008.
Other

“Wealth is not without its advantages, and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 1, Section I, p. 13

“The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“No one, either in the nineteenth century or the twentieth, has ever built a persuasive case proving that dinosaurs as a whole were more like reptilian crocodiles than warm-blooded birds. No one has done this because it can't be done.”

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Robert T. Bakker 30

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