In a Republican district I was a Republican. In a Democratic district I was a Democrat. And in a doubtful district, I was Doubtful. But I was always for Erie.

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.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

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.

Wisdom is the reward for surviving our own stupidity.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Children rarely follow parental advice unless it is acted out repeatedly. It’s called being an example.

Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.

If you want to be an actor, you have to do it because you love acting, not because you want to be a celebrity.

Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

The team is the star, never an individual player.

Margaret Thatcher - this great lady has not only served her country well, she has served the free world well.

The desire for glory clings even to the best men longer than any other passion.