Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

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.

The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.

A word mother, means a world to me.

Hell is something you carry with you.

Kindness has converted more sinners than either zeal, eloquence, or learning; and these three last have never converted any.

Judging others’ intentions is the right of God alone. We don’t have this right, and it is poor manners with God.

Working with my husband, I thought we would be at each other. As close as we are, our styles are so different. But it didn't happen - we were surprised.

Being brave is being scared and worried and still doing it [what you do]. Because if you're just a wacko, a mashugana, a crazy guy, then you're not brave, your nuts!

Artists want to sell their work, sure. But they aren't out there asking questions about what people want and what they don't want, now are they?

Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free choice.

We had the skirts with the slits up the side, sort of tough, sort of Spanish Harlem cool, but sweet too.