60 Quotes by Ernst Mayr

Every politician, clergyman, educator, or physician, in short, anyone dealing with human individuals, is bound to make grave mistakes if he ignores these two great truths of population zoology: (1) no two individuals are alike, and (2) both environment and genetic endowment make a contribution to nearly every trait.

I have the honesty to say I’m an Atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God.

The most consequential change in man’s view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts.

I feel that one species, mankind, doesn’t have the right to exterminate.

I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species – often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus – occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.