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" 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. "

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

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

" An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. "

" The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago. "

" Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character. "

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

" I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife. "

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal. "

" 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. "

" What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts. "