I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

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.

Have you thrown ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ at her yet?

I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.

It's not getting what you want that's the hard part, it's deciding what you want.

[Sarah] Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

If you wish to live a life free from sorrow, think of what is going to happen as if it had already happened.

If you ever make anything too literal you might as well forget it. It loses everything.

Leadership is the sum of those qualities of intellect, human understanding, and moral character that enables a person to inspire and control a group of people successfully.

According to the Social Security Administration, in 1945, 41.9 workers supported each individual retiree, while today only 3.3 workers support each retiree. This system cannot continue.

Remember that a man, a true man, never hates. His rages and his bad moods never last beyond the present moment-like electric shocks.

Caring is a reflex. Someone slips, your arm goes out. A car is in the ditch, you join others and push... You live, you help.