Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

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.

Even intellectuals should have learned by now that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs.

Every new morning, I write a grateful gratitude for the new grace.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

If you're undercover for two or three years, I think you lose your private life.

I take the typical words, or I pick a two-word, three-word pattern. One of the things I'm known for is I was one of the first rappers to end their bars rhyming multisyllabically.

The public me, the one named Elizabeth Taylor, has become a lot of hokum and fabrication - a bunch of drivel - and I find her slightly revolting.

When you grew up like me and my four brothers, you end up feeling somewhat inadequate, like somehow you don't count.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

We're certainly looking forward for consolidating and strengthening the U.S.-Egyptian relationship.

Insofar as he'd formed any opinion of her, it was that she suffered from misplaced gentility and the mistaken belief that etiquette meant good breeding. She mistook mannerisms for manners.