E. O. Wilson quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by E. O. Wilson

E. O. Wilson Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from E. O. Wilson on Wise Famous Quotes.

The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have.

Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.

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

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

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

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

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

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

To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

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

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

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

In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.

Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.

We use pandas and eagles and things. I'd love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression.

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

In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.

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

No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet,

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

Exclusion makes us suffer, inclusion makes us thrive.

When all else fails, men turn to reason.

The commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.

Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

I want us to save the creation-not just care about it, but to save it.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.

Science and religion are the two most powerful forces in the world. Having them at odds ... is not productive.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

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

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

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

The laws of biology are written in the language of diversity.

Every kid has a bug period ... I never grew out of mine.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

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.

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

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

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

An ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a book-keeper.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.

Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.

I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.

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

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

Go as far as you can, [young scientists]. The world needs you badly.

The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper

The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.

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

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

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

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

[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

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