Quotes from Stephen Jay Gould

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.

I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano.

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.

Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.

A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.

The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.

Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

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.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.

Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.