The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

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.

Politics is all about dividing up the power. Washington D.C. likes to talk about spreading the wealth, but never spreading the power.

Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyse it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning.

The female perspective is what I relate to and I understand it. I find it fascinating. I like to see women in challenging situations and see how they deal with it or don't deal with it.

In the car and in front of the camera I tend to be very calm but behind the scenes I can get fired up and passionate, I just don't see the need to shout my mouth off in public.

The best preparation for the future is a well-spent today.

Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.

If you're not exposing yourself to a non-consensus view somehow over the course of a day, you can reject them, but you should expose yourself to them.

The world is upside down, it's going to take a lot of hands to turn it right side up.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

We can't live life perfectly fully, because we sleep eight hours a day! We can live life only partly fully!