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.

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.

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.

An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.

A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn’t open to anywhere good.

I would imagine that most of the people who consider themselves successful aren't, at least in the ways that really matter-myself included.

You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment.

I am considering running for Senate, as well as other opportunities.

Non-co-operation intended to pave the way to real honourable and voluntary co-operation based on mutual respect and trust.

Religion is an important institution. A nation without religion cannot survive.

Contentions for trifles can get but a trifling victory.

I like simple writing. I'd rather read Hemingway than Burroughs.