395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

Why get excited over this latest episode in the long, sad history of American anti-intellectualism? Let me suggest that, as patriotic Americans, we should cringe in embarrassment that, at the dawn of a new, technological millennium, a jurisdiction in our heartland has opted to suppress one of the greatest triumphs of human discovery.

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible...

The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start, and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science -or any honest intellectual inquiry.

Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity – the most precious trait of any adequate analysis – is erased.

Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn’t science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.