Top 100 E. O. Wilson Quotes
#1. Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.
E. O. Wilson
#2. The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven't even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?
E. O. Wilson
#3. The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.
E. O. Wilson
#4. If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.
E. O. Wilson
#6. The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.
E. O. Wilson
#7. Because the living environment is what really sustains us.
E. O. Wilson
#8. For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
E. O. Wilson
#9. Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.
E. O. Wilson
#10. Companies that are willing to share, to withhold in order to further the growth of the company, willing to try to get a better atmosphere through a demonstration of democratic principles, fairness and cooperation, a better product, those will win in the end.
E. O. Wilson
#11. So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.
E. O. Wilson
#12. I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.
E. O. Wilson
#13. If religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would be soon solved. If there is any moral precept shared by people of all beliefs, it is that we owe ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment.
E. O. Wilson
#14. Exclusion makes us suffer, inclusion makes us thrive.
E. O. Wilson
#15. Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do ...
E. O. Wilson
#16. To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.
E. O. Wilson
#17. If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.
E. O. Wilson
#18. Biodiversity is the totality of all inherited variation in the life forms of Earth, of which we are one species. We study and save it to our great benefit. We ignore and degrade it to our great peril.
E. O. Wilson
#19. The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.
E. O. Wilson
#20. Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
E. O. Wilson
#21. One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.
E. O. Wilson
#22. Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.
E. O. Wilson
#23. The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity.
E. O. Wilson
#24. I think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.
E. O. Wilson
#25. The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.
E. O. Wilson
#26. I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.
E. O. Wilson
#27. Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
E. O. Wilson
#28. I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
E. O. Wilson
#29. It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.
E. O. Wilson
#30. The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.
E. O. Wilson
#31. All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.
E. O. Wilson
#32. No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.
E. O. Wilson
#33. Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
E. O. Wilson
#34. It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.
E. O. Wilson
#35. People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obligated by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.
E. O. Wilson
#36. Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
E. O. Wilson
#37. In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity - and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.
E. O. Wilson
#38. Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression.
E. O. Wilson
#39. The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
E. O. Wilson
#40. Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.
E. O. Wilson
#41. So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we've been around for only one million years
too soon be sure.
E. O. Wilson
#42. But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.
E. O. Wilson
#43. If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
E. O. Wilson
#44. Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
E. O. Wilson
#45. Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.
E. O. Wilson
#46. It was inspiring to learn of the new Bachelor of Environmental Studies Program, and I congratulate you for it. Singapore is geographically in the right central position for an influence in Asia and Australia, and NUS has the reputation and academic strength to make it effective.
E. O. Wilson
#47. In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
E. O. Wilson
#48. Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
E. O. Wilson
#49. We don't know nearly enough about the complexities of Nature. If we think we can eliminate natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, i.e. clean air or water with fusion energy - we are kidding ourselves.
E. O. Wilson
#50. The commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.
E. O. Wilson
#51. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
E. O. Wilson
#52. And pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn't matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people's minds.
E. O. Wilson
#53. We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.
E. O. Wilson
#54. In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.
E. O. Wilson
#55. In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.
E. O. Wilson
#56. I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.
E. O. Wilson
#57. In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.
E. O. Wilson
#58. Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
E. O. Wilson
#59. In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
E. O. Wilson
#60. The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
E. O. Wilson
#61. Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.
E. O. Wilson
#62. I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
E. O. Wilson
#63. [W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
E. O. Wilson
#64. No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.
E. O. Wilson
#65. To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
E. O. Wilson
#66. So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.
E. O. Wilson
#67. I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.
E. O. Wilson
#68. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.
E. O. Wilson
#69. We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.
E. O. Wilson
#70. We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.
E. O. Wilson
#71. The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.
E. O. Wilson
#72. I believe that traditional religious belief and scientific knowledge depict the universe in radically different ways. At the bedrock they are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
E. O. Wilson
#73. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.
E. O. Wilson
#74. In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.
E. O. Wilson
#75. What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.
E. O. Wilson
#76. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. Wilson
#77. Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.
E. O. Wilson
#78. Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.
E. O. Wilson
#79. Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds ... is not productive.
E. O. Wilson
#80. In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.
E. O. Wilson
#81. No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet,
E. O. Wilson
#82. When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
E. O. Wilson
#83. Sstudying ants just quickly became part of me because I was allowed to wander, explore and find things and figure things out myself. And I saw how much was there and what could be done and how I could make a life of it.
E. O. Wilson
#84. I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
E. O. Wilson
#85. Every kid has a bug period, I like to say, and I just got so fascinated and I had that experience, that wonderful life of being able to go out on my own without really any supervision at all. I just lucked out that way. I was trusted as a kid.
E. O. Wilson
#86. The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.
E. O. Wilson
#87. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.
E. O. Wilson
#88. We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.
E. O. Wilson
#89. Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.
E. O. Wilson
#90. Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
E. O. Wilson
#91. The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.
E. O. Wilson
#92. One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.
E. O. Wilson
#93. That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.
E. O. Wilson
#94. We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.
E. O. Wilson
#95. We are not afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters ...
E. O. Wilson
#96. Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?
E. O. Wilson
#97. Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.
E. O. Wilson
#98. Every kid has a bug period ... I never grew out of mine.
E. O. Wilson
#99. Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard ... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.
E. O. Wilson
#100. Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.
E. O. Wilson
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