World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

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.

Lack of will power has caused more failures than lack of intelligence or ability.

In every aspect of life, purity and holiness, cleanliness and refinement, exalt the human condition . . . Even in the physical realm, cleanliness will conduce to spirituality.

I have spoken to people in intelligence. And they are big believers in, as an example, waterboarding. Because they say it does work. It does work.

I feel quite proud to be an ambassador for women who realize that being fit is better than being skinny.

I guess anyone would be nervous to give your life over to someone to make a film about it.

It's impossible to expect polite behavior from people who've never witnessed it.

If they can see you love them, you can say anything to them.

And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this-kitchen-candle.

It never seems to occur to anybody that some women may not want to find husbands.

Take me ham away, take away my eggs, even my Chili, but leave me my newspaper.