Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

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.

They were the Saturday Club, a secret society of which only the four of them were aware and which none other could join.

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, one will get the situation one has prepared for.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

When a guy is into you, he lets you know it. He calls, he shows up, he wants to meet your friends, he can't keep his eyes or hands off of you.

This strategy represents our policy for all time. Until it's changed.

Saltwater heals, healing referring to its various forms; tears, cleanses and heals the soul; sweat, cleanses through labor; the ocean, heals in all its forms.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.