1,070 Quotes by E. O. Wilson

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.

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.

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

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

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.

Adults forget the depths of languor into which the adolescent mind decends with ease. They are prone to undervalue the mental growth that occurs during daydreaming and aimless wandering.

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.

If we lose half the species, which could happen by the end of the century if we don’t do anything, that’s going to create a big difference down the line in the stability and even the economic potential in the living world. Irreversibly.

Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth’s surface, but they do...