E. O. Wilson Quotes
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
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There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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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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An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.
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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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If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
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The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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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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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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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.
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Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
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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.
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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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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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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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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 education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.
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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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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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What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.