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

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" Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. "

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

" The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity. "

" It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt. "

" People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there. "

" In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty. "

" But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture. "

" If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable. "

" So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. "

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" 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. "

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

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

" People respect nonfiction but they read novels. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they've had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years. "