E. O. Wilson Quotes
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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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The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
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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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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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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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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.
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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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Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.
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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.
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The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.
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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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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.
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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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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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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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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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Every kid has a bug period... I never grew out of mine.
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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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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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The education of women is the best way to save the environment.
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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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Piaget, who was originally trained as a biologist, views intellectual development as an interaction of an inherited genetic program with the environment. It is no coincidence that he calls this conception 'genetic epistemology,' in effect the study of the hereditary unfolding of understanding.