68 quotes
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
Much of good science — and perhaps all of great science — has its roots in fantasy.
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper.
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
We have stone age emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.
Old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
The key to the sociobiology of mammals is milk.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)
The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.
Samuel Butler's famous aphorism that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg has been modernized: the organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
In the process of natural selection, then. any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)
To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.
Letters to a Young Scientist (2013)
Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)
Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)
This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.
Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.
On Human Nature (1978)