The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.

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.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives

You can't be spontaneous within reason.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion and somethings an indirect boast.

Tell me what's going on here. Why can I hear your voice inside my head and why did you say you came to school for me?" "I was tired of admiring your legs from a distance.

There never was a good war, or a bad peace.

With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer.

I don't expect anybody here to cheerlead for Donald Trump. I expect us to have platforms like this, where we can fairly and effectively and respectfully come in and state the case on his behalf.

When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?

Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism's coffin.

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the 'Origin', was, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!'