...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

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.

Where unwilling dies the rose Buds the new another year.

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.

You have to be quite grounded, and I don't know what that is. Sometimes, that means being vulnerable.

Humaneness and justice are the means by which to govern properly. When government is carried out properly, people feel close to the leadership and think little of dying for it.

God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.

I encourage you to make money and to become enlightened. The two are not necessarily different. Have fun with whatever you do because we are only here for a while.

Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

An armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics - that without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe.

The secret of landscapes isn't creation...It's maintenance.

I hope to contribute to a global warming of hearts and a climate change in human consciousness.