1,070 Quotes by E. O. Wilson

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.

People yearn to be in one of the best – a combat marine regiment, an elite college, the executive committee of a company, a religious sect, a fraternity, a garden club – any collectivity that can be compared favorably with other, competing groups.

We are not afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters...

Man’s destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.

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.

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.

Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms – if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.

Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

Exclusion makes us suffer, inclusion makes us thrive.