Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bact...

I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hy...

My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges...

We pass through this world but once.

The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced an...

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion str...

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your...

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, ...

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near c...

I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had m...

Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in ...

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical...

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information it is a creative human activity.

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion th...

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind....

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and...

Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of...

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.

Bless all the women of this world who nurture our heritage while too many man rush off to kill for i...

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the a...

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesti...

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the...

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that ...

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold p...

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into leg...

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys ...

People, as curious primates, dote on concrete objects that can be seen and fondled. God dwells among...

If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done...

We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards o...

Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial...

Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should...

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort...