Life learned early on to recognize itself.

We are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

All living beings, not just animals, but plants and microorganisms, perceive. To survive, an organic being must perceive - it must seek, or at least recognize, food and avoid environmental danger.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

People say I am against Darwin. That is ridiculous.

Formal education and current position can define your worthiness. What makes you extraordinary is defined by your attitude towards others.

Nothing compares to the feeling that you get when you are in love.

You do not need permission to be you. Just be your authentic, brilliant, one-soul-only self. You are a marvel. Act like it!

I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette.

My mother once said if you can’t handle the fact that your world-view might be entirely inaccurate, you are not worthy of believing in it.

I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States.

I have a new saying, what I see in Vegas, I am telling everybody.

When there are boys you have to worry about how you look, and whether they like you, and why they like another girl better, and whether they're going to ask you to something or other. It's a strain.

Usually [the lyrics] go from one word to the next word - there's no finish line. The music was that way, too.

All is lovely outside my house and inside my house and myself.