Quotes from E. O. Wilson

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.

It's always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That's just in human relationships.

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

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.

Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.

The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.

Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Much of good science and perhaps all of great science has its roots in fantasy.

We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors.

One planet, one experiment.

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.