E. O. Wilson Quotes
Top 94 wise famous quotes and sayings by E. O. Wilson
E. O. Wilson Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from E. O. Wilson on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it's a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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.
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.
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.
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.
No barrier stands between the material world of science and the sensibilities of the hunter and the poet,
To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
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.
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.
Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.
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 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.
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.
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.
I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.
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.
[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.