We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

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.

Love is the heartbeat of the sacred soul.

If we walk far enough, " says Dorothy, "we shall sometime come to someplace.

Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity

The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

If a man is known by the company he keeps, so also his character is reflected in the books he reads.

In France, I am so free. I have more freedom than most American directors could dare to even imagine.

If you want to play a cool punk club, that's great - but punk clubs don't have any toilet seats. After a while, little things like that become big issues.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.