Quotes About Diversity

He was accompanied by his occasional 'security assistant,' a man called Prawney, who was tall, bald, and African-American. These characteristics were practically mandatory at the security firm that employed Prawney. Many of its celebrity clients were white, and white celebrities always wanted big, shiny, black muscle. It was a status thing.

Lessons: Diversity = resilience. Abundance = resilience. to survive catastrophe, you need a surplus, a reservoir, money under the mattress, food in the fridge. If you're already starving, you won't survive a famine. Take the world down to the bone and the only thing that flourishes are boneyards; the only thing that expands is collapse.

Species differ - but are often not very different. Only humans have human minds. But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because only humans have human skeletons, only humans have skeletons.

I see many colors. They smell many scents. Our experience isn't the same. But it's comparably vivid.

If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

We humans, as species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestral intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphines, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales?

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right?

Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, Gentlemen, let's proceed, and sensing Ellie's frown would add, Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys. The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie...

if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced.

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefitted our species.

Most of us are for freedom of expression when there's a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We're not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

Christiaan Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. "The world is my country," he said, "science my religion.

No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament).

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters to sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in depth.

In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up.

If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory.

A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay.

In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious.

Freedom of belief is pernicious," Bellarmine wrote on another occasion. "It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.

Kita tidak mempertanyakan apa guna burung berkicau, sebab kicauan adalah kenikmatan mereka sejak mereka diciptakan untuk berkicau. Kita pun semestinya tidak mempertanyakan mengapa manusia bersusah payah menyingkap rahasia langit... Keanekaragaman fenomena alam sungguh luar biasa, harta karun yang tersembunyi di langit bergitu banyak dan tertata dengan sangat baik sehingga akal manusia tidak akan pernah kekurangan nutrisi segar"---Johannes Kepler__ Hal.45