Ernst Mayr Quotes
The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.

Quotes to Explore
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Being a conservative in Hollywood is like walking into a shooting range with a bull's-eye attached to your body. There are more of us than you would believe, but if you want to keep working, you feel like you have to keep quiet.
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I had two things I could do: I could run over you, and I could put a good stiff arm on you. That was about it.
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During my early years, I was mercurially lively, always in motion, spilling over with pranks, impertinent and precocious, and, at the same time, intractably stubborn and angry if anything went against my will.
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I think every movie is its own little world, and a director certainly sets the tone.
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Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
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Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail or disappoint me... I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.
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I'm into song-writing; I'm into melodies that break your heart a little bit. That's the thing that got me into music; that's what I look for in music for the most part.
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I started to realize that comedy is what I really wanted to do, but I didn't want to do stand-up.
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I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
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I'd like to be remembered as someone who made a difference in the lives of young people - that I nurtured someone and taught them to pursue their dreams and their careers, to leave a legacy.
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Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.
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You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.
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FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.
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You just have to stay positive.
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It's a really fun hobby to set imagery to music, and finding the right songs for that. Your favorite song in the world might not work at all... for one reason or another.
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Fictional comedy tells us that the writer is remarkable. Factual comedy tells us that the world is remarkable. I suppose I prefer to live in a remarkable world.
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I guess the biggest issue my husband and I are going to have is how do we raise the baby... because he's Jewish and I'm Protestant and the baby's father is Catholic.
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Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.
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The great love of my life is music.
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Parliament is more than procedure - it is the custodian of the nation's freedom.
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The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.