Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

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.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

When the rain stops falling, the pain comes fooling.

If we have a purpose in life beyond being a cog in the human machine, mine is to help inspire people and that's pretty cool. I would like to motivate the world.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

If money was my only motivation, I would organize myself differently.

And it is not necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelette in the pan for the love of God.

I am not in the world. The world is in me.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

For plague and pestilence, plunder and pollution, the hazards of nature and the hunger of children are the foes of every nation. The earth, the sea and the air are the concern of every nation.

I realized that perseverence and step-by-step progress are the only ways to reach a goal along a chosen path.