The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

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.

Confidence doesn't come out of nowhere. It's a result of something... hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.

I've met Nelson Mandela a couple of times and it was an unbelievable experience on both occasions; the most amazing moment of my life.

I've always wanted to do a movie, and I really feel the urge to do it.I'm in Hollywood - I have no business not being in the movie industry.

Out of the homes of America will come the future citizens of America, and only as those homes are what they should be will this nation be what it should be.

The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.

All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.

Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.

He confesses his crime who flees the tribunal.

I think every human being has a level of melancholy in life and in general.