Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

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 journal my joy, and my joy expands exponentially forevermore. So be it.

Believe me, the loss of hope is far worse than the loss of limbs.

I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.

Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean.

I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.

You have to have the passion. I could not live if I wasn't an actor. If you're just in it for beautiful dresses and movie stars, then I think you should not be an actor.

Of all "rights" which command attention at the present time among us, woman's rights seem to take precedence.

Influence: What you think you have until you try to use it.

Presumably a movement is more polite than a revolution, and a lot slower.

I kicked a boy in the shins in second grade for making fun of my father.