Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? "

E. O. Wilson

Important

God

Thoughts

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

E. O. Wilson

Learning

World

" 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. "

E. O. Wilson

Behavior

Growth

" 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. "

" I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect. "

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

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

" In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time. "

" 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. "

" Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction. "

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

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

E. O. Wilson

Bible

Strict

" Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution. "

" 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. "

" Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals. "

" 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. "

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

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

" There is no better high than discovery. "

" Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind. "

" Because the living environment is what really sustains us. "

" 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. "

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

" Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers. "

E. O. Wilson

Tell

Ants

" The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views? "

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

" 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. "