A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

If you don't have love, you don't have anything at all.

The champions of liberty have the medal for any necklace. (Les champions de la liberte - Ont la médaille pour tout collier)

For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Frugality is one thing, avarice another.

Wait'll next year! is the favorite cry of baseball fans, football fans, hockey fans, and gardeners.

It's a good question, because to be believable is the only way that you could be successful.

I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.