It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in . . . art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure.

Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances.

Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent.

The most reliable joy is to be out of doors, to be a creature among other creatures. I find it very restful.

The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."

We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.

Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago.

When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos.

In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.

book variables, student variables, and school variables.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating the mind is like a car battery - it recharges by running.

Opportunities, creative ideas or the lack of them, happiness, frustration, brilliance, talent, success and failure - all are determined by the state of mind that you're in.

Every writer must have a chip of ice in his heart.

My life is not unlike Truman's. I can't go anywhere.

I may be Jewish, but my religion is hip-hop.

Luck: when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's.

Cryptography has generated number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra, combinatorics and computers.