Quotes from Stephen Jay Gould

If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have.

Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as 'the intelligent layperson' does exist - in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.

I think there have to be Bachs and Beethovens. We may have - there are so many more people. Musical training is available to so many more, but it may be that we've hit a right wall in terms of accessible styles and since we demand innovation as a criterion of genius, there may not be more innovative styles to be found.

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.

In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

God was there when it happened. We were not there.... Therefore, we are completely limited to what God has seen fit to tell us, and this information is in His written Word.

The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.

Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.