But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

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.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew

For every question, there is an answer. Where everybody fails is by asking the wrong question.

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

Jace stood up, knocking his chair back violently. "You are not taking Clary to the Seelie Court without me and THAT is FINAL.

All we are asked to bear we can bear.

A man perfect to the finger tips.

At the last census it indicated that about 22 per cent of Australians were born overseas.

You cannot write down how people are good; you just know it, and cannot get away from it.

All that some actresses want is for people to take them seriously instead of caring about how they look.

Everybody talks about population growth and its disastrous effect on climate change, food security and resource depletion, but nobody does anything about it