E. O. Wilson Quotes
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People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.
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In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival...
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The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
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Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
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Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.
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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.
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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.
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We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
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Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
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I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.
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Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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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.
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For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.
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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.
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Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
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Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?