All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

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.

Courage comes from knowing that fear is a false perception.

There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.

There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system...

When we're down and the momentum is stacked against us. Those are the moments when we find out what we're made of. When we learn to trust and lean on each other.

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

I'm an old curmudgeon and I know it.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

Passion for a goal doesn't guarantee success, but without it, you can't even begin.

Of particular importance to us is the recognition... that what we want is a Europe of nations, not a federal super-state.