Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

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.

Were you always such a stubborn, blind, obtuse girl?”“Are you calling me stupid?”“Yes, but in a more poetic way!”“Well, here’s a poem for you. Get lost!

This life is YOURS. Only YOU can live your life to the FULLEST. So OWN it!

Present joys are more to flesh and blood Than the dull prospect of a distant good.

I have a life and do a lot of things, and so far my work has been my life. If I was a painter no one would question me about my age. I'm an artist, I hate saying that.

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You dont change. But when you understand it, it changes.

Be more humble than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree, always offering respect onto others and never expecting any in return

I always wanted to be an actor. I had the arrogance to believe I couldn't be anything else.

When you feel your book is the height of irrelevance you can return to the excitement of the daily news.

Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.

Before I got glasses, I thought Monet was the world's only realist landscape painter.