We pass through this world but once.

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.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained

There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.

Why not just do something a little more on the gentle side?

I'm not going out there and doing the same material every night. I have this amazing audience of fans who have been listening to me, some of them since 1975.

Friendship maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.

Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.

The inner child runs rampant. They're just smaller, that's all.

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

There are poor white people who hear rap music and feel it is about them, because it is. That's why you have an Eminem and a Bubba Sparxxx and rappers like that.

Difficulty need not foreshadow despair or defeat. Rather achievement can be all the more satisfying because of obstacles surmounted.