Quotes About Diversity

Some teachers, the less effective ones, thought that fair meant distributing instruction equally to all students regardless of their needs. The exemplary teachers we studied, however thought fair meant working in ways that evened out differences between students

What about everybody else Pye? How many lives can there be in one universe?'[...] 'How many lives Richard?'[...]'One.'.

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most–suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another–are defeated.

Praise and blame are all the same is a fancy way of reminding yourself of the old cliché that you'll never be able to please all the people all the time. Even in a landslide election victory in which a candidate secures 55 percent of the vote, he or she is left with 45 percent of the population that wishes someone else were the winner. Pretty humbling, isn't it?

Yet, there is no such push to get more women into coal mines, offshore drilling, or on garbage trucks.

the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.

I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn't that a far more wonderful thought than any myth?

if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.

however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.

when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them.

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another. Chimp and human, lizard and fungus, we have all evolved over some three billion years by a process known as natural selection.

Elitism has become a dirty word, and it is a pity. Elitism is reprehensible only when it is snobbish and exclusive. The best sort of elitism tries to expand the élite by encouraging more and more people to join it . . . Science is inherently interesting, and the interest will shine through without the need for soundbites, gimmicks or dumbing down.

We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.

Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called 'Mount Improbable'.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips

Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

In terms of the analogy, suppose an ideally balanced crew would consist of four right-handers and four left-handers. Once again assume that the coach, unaware of this fact, selects blindly on 'merit'. Now if the pool of candidates happens to be dominated by right-handers, any individual left-hander will tend to be at an advantage: he is likely to cause any boat in which he finds himself to win, and he will therefore appear to be a good oarsman.

There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of 'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions.

Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?

Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?* This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer.