Quotes from E. O. Wilson

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.

Is a universe of discrete material particles possible only with one specific set of natural laws and parameter values? In other words, does human imagination, which can conceive of other laws and values, thereby exceed possible existence?

There is no better high than discovery.

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

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.

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.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

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.

We've got paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technologies.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms - folded them into its genes - and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.