No one-liner can ever be optimal.

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.

As a child, I was very careful not to erase my mother's writing on the chalkboard because I would miss her.

Self-esteem, self confidence

I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.[Epitaph from Gail Borden's gravestone.]

Culture is so incredibly important because it is the foundation for all future innovation. People with passion can change the world.

We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, labor in vain.

Those who have suffered much are like those who know many languages; they have learned to understand and be understood by all.

Actually, I get a little say in what my character would or wouldn't do.

Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it.