182 Quotes by Lewis Thomas

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.

I don’t want to be reincarnated, that’s for sure. When you’ve had rewarding experiences in your life – a loving family, friends – you don’t need additional reassurances that you’re going to do something with a new cast of characters. I’d just as soon pass.

I don’t think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look – quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ That came about because people misread Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’

If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn’t help; best to let it lie there.

I won’t compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them – whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years – are still in their very earliest stages.

I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.

I do not agree with this century’s fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.