Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

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.

The worst mistake I ever made has become the best thing I ever did.- Darius Wainwright

Adultery is the ultimate deal-breaker for me. I would rather be alone than in a relationship that doesn't honor me.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.

Let's just say it was damn hard [to make the Hangover]. I've got the bumps and bruises to show for it. It's funny because things that don't even look that bad on screen were still extremely painful.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell

If you think too long, you think wrong.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

I'd love to be abducted. I'd sit on my deck at home waiting all night long to be abducted. But that's never happened that I know of.

I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.