The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

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.

In the book, you lost your powers. In the movie, you chose not to use them as much. I guess I did a little of both.

You don't get happy by sitting around going on, 'Oh this is a horrible situation, what to do?' You've got to find the courage to change that. I think change is extremely hard for people.

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error.

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood

I'm not in the business of saying just one thing about just one place. If you only see Palestine in my films, then I've failed because then I'm just a provincial filmmaker.

In Hawaii they say, "aloha." That's a nice one, It means both "hello" and "good-bye" Which just goes to show, if you spend enough time in the sun you don't know whether you're coming or going.

It's true, we are a highly professional force and we can produce highly lethal fighting forces, but I defy you to find more dedicated humanitarians or better friends when the chips are down.

Don't fully trust anyone until he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing.

What know we of the Blest above but that they sing, and that they love?