Quotes from Stephen Jay Gould

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.

Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.

Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion

If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.

Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.

The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.