Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.
Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.
In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.
All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.
Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.
The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.
We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
I like what Abba Eban once said during the 1967 war. He said, "When all else fails, men turn to reason."
No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet.
By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.
Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds... is not productive.
The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.
The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.
It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.
Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.
Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.
Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.
It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.