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Quotes from The Flamingo's Smile — Stephen Jay Gould

1941–2002 United States

← All quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

4 quotes

The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science—if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.

The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.

The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions—and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.

The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stephen Jay Gould (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.