The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies.

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.

They [students] had two common, strongly held expectations: the college should exhibit the behavior it expected from students and hold true to its espoused values.

Pretend that you are the soul inside everyone you meet.

Do not allow the opinions of others to oppress you.

I get very homesick, but otherwise it's a great privilege to get to travel for work.

I believe that the road to pre-eminent success in any line of work is to make yourself master of that line of work.

I could be a housewife… I guess I’ve vacuumed a couple of times.

Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all.

Disappointment over nationalistic authoritarian regimes may have contributed to the fact that today religion offers a new and subjectively more convincing language for old political orientations.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

Because He moves against faults, God is said to be angered, although He is moved by no disturbance of equanimity.