Top 91 Edward O. Wilson Quotes
#1. Human nature is deeper and broader than the artificial contrivance of any existing culture.
Edward O. Wilson
#3. The greater problems of history are not solved; they are merely forgotten.
Edward O. Wilson
#4. You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.
Edward O. Wilson
#5. If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.
Edward O. Wilson
#6. Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Edward O. Wilson
#7. The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.
Edward O. Wilson
#8. To get hold of the human condition, we need next a much broader definition of history than is conventionally used.
Edward O. Wilson
#9. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.
Edward O. Wilson
#10. Original discoveries, to remind you, are what counts the most. Let me put that more strongly: they are all that counts. They are the silver and gold of science.
Edward O. Wilson
#11. All of the species that have attained eusociality, as I have stressed, live in fortified nest sites.
Edward O. Wilson
#12. It often occurs to me that if, against all odds, there is a judgmental God and heaven, it will come to pass that when the pearly gates open, those who had the valor to think for themselves will be escorted to the head of the line, garlanded, and given their own personal audience.
Edward O. Wilson
#13. Socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.
Edward O. Wilson
#14. So what could the hypothetical aliens learn from us that has any value to them? The correct answer is the humanities.
Edward O. Wilson
#15. except for behaving like apes much of the time and suffering genetically limited life spans, we are godlike.
Edward O. Wilson
#16. Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled. The question it poses, of universal and orderly materialism, is the most important that can be asked in philosophy and religion.
Edward O. Wilson
#17. Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions,
Edward O. Wilson
#18. Like most other mammals, human beings display a behavioral scale, a spectrum of responses that appear or disappear according to particular circumstances.
Edward O. Wilson
#20. They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.
Edward O. Wilson
#21. The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck - good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever. All
Edward O. Wilson
#22. [S]elfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members. (63)
Edward O. Wilson
#24. Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger.
Edward O. Wilson
#25. Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
Edward O. Wilson
#26. There must be an ability to pass long hours in study and research with pleasure even though some of the effort will inevitably lead to dead ends. Such is the price of admission.
Edward O. Wilson
#27. Are human beings intrinsically good but corruptible by the forces of evil, or the reverse, innately sinful yet redeemable by the forces of good?
Edward O. Wilson
#28. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.
Edward O. Wilson
#29. Human beings were made for music. Its thrill and rapture are picked up almost immediately by little children
Edward O. Wilson
#30. Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings.
Edward O. Wilson
#31. Animals of the land environment are dominated by species with the most complex social systems.
Edward O. Wilson
#32. What drove the hominins on through to larger brains, higher intelligence, and thence language-based culture? That, of course, is the question of questions.
Edward O. Wilson
#33. The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism.
Edward O. Wilson
#34. In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.
Edward O. Wilson
#35. Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.
Edward O. Wilson
#36. Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.
Edward O. Wilson
#37. We are chemosensory idiots. By comparison most other organisms are geniuses.
Edward O. Wilson
#38. Earth relates to the Universe as the second segment of the left antenna of an aphid sitting on a flower petal in a garden in Teaneck, New Jersey, for a few hours this afternoon.
Edward O. Wilson
#39. [Scientific humanism is] the only worldview compatible with science's growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature.
Edward O. Wilson
#40. You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.
Edward O. Wilson
#41. To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots - the outsized equivalents of ants.
Edward O. Wilson
#42. The origin of the human condition is best explained by the natural selection for social interaction - the inherited propensities to communicate, recognize, evaluate, bond, cooperate, compete, and from all these the deep warm pleasure of belonging to your own special group.
Edward O. Wilson
#43. I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.
Edward O. Wilson
#44. If our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.
Edward O. Wilson
#46. Also, human groups are formed of highly flexible alliances, not just among family members but between families, genders, classes, and tribes. The bonding is based on cooperation among individuals or groups who know one another and are capable of distributing ownership and status on a personal basis.
Edward O. Wilson
#47. Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips ...
Edward O. Wilson
#48. People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They
Edward O. Wilson
#49. Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species
Edward O. Wilson
#50. (Writers of Earth-invader science fiction, please remember to provide all your aliens with soft grasping hands or tentacles or some other fleshy fat appendages.)
Edward O. Wilson
#51. The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.
Edward O. Wilson
#52. I believe that the ten billion people expected to be present at the end of the century will enjoy a far better quality of life if we conserve half of the planet for nature than if we consume nature entirely.
Edward O. Wilson
#54. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors.
Edward O. Wilson
#55. Here indeed is a major difference between people and ants: where we send our young men to war, ants send their old ladies. No moral lesson there, unless you are looking for a less expensive form of elder care.
Edward O. Wilson
#56. The most successful scientist thinks like a poet - wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical - and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.
Edward O. Wilson
#57. Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.
Edward O. Wilson
#58. The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.
Edward O. Wilson
#59. Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.
Edward O. Wilson
#60. People around the world today, growing cautious of war and fearful of its consequences, have turned increasingly to its moral equivalent in team sports.
Edward O. Wilson
#61. A distinguished researcher once commented to me that a real scientist is someone who can think about a subject while talking to his or her spouse about something else.
Edward O. Wilson
#63. The agent causing the most immediate damage to species in fresh water are dams, great boosters of local economies but unfortunately chief demons of aquatic habitat destruction. Their
Edward O. Wilson
#64. Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind decends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering
Edward O. Wilson
#65. If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.
Edward O. Wilson
#66. Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.
Edward O. Wilson
#67. What is man? Storyteller, mythmaker, and destroyer of the living world. Thinking
Edward O. Wilson
#68. A typical battlefield of this struggle is Hawaii, America's most deceptively beautiful state. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity. When
Edward O. Wilson
#69. When the great theologian and philosopher Rabbi Hillel was challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, he replied, Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.
Edward O. Wilson
#71. Is a universe of discrete material particles possible only with one specific set of natural laws and parameter values? In other words, does human imagination, which can conceive of other laws and values, thereby exceed possible existence?
Edward O. Wilson
#72. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.
Edward O. Wilson
#73. HISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT PREHISTORY, AND PREHISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT BIOLOGY. KNOWLEDGE OF PREHISTORY AND BIOLOGY IS INCREASING RAPIDLY, BRINGING INTO FOCUS HOW HUMANITY ORIGINATED AND WHY A SPECIES LIKE OUR OWN EXISTS ON THIS PLANET.
Edward O. Wilson
#74. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm freedom and dignity
Edward O. Wilson
#76. TO FORM GROUPS, drawing visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups - these are among the absolute universals of human nature and hence of culture.
Edward O. Wilson
#77. the biological mind is the essence and the very meaning of the human condition.
Edward O. Wilson
#78. Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
Edward O. Wilson
#80. An estimated hundred billion star systems make up the Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers believe that all are orbited by an average of at least one planet.
Edward O. Wilson
#81. Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.
Edward O. Wilson
#82. The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it ... If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.
Edward O. Wilson
#83. [E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Edward O. Wilson
#84. A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.
Edward O. Wilson
#85. Let's also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.
Edward O. Wilson
#86. 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.
Edward O. Wilson
#87. The great religions are also, and tragically, sources of ceaseless and unnecessary suffering. They are impediments to the grasp of reality needed to solve most social problems in the real world.
Edward O. Wilson
#88. The best way to live in this real world is to free ourselves of demons and tribal gods.
Edward O. Wilson
#89. A spider spinning its web intends, whether conscious of the outcome or not, to catch a fly. That is the meaning of the web.
Edward O. Wilson
#90. Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child.
Edward O. Wilson
#91. Raises a fundamental question: are we also evolving genetically? Medical research, added to a deepening analysis of the three billion nucleotide letters of the human genome, has revealed that evolution is indeed still occurring
Edward O. Wilson
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