395 Quotes by Stephen Jay Gould

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes – one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life’s major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection.

The originator of an idea cannot be held responsible for egregious misuse of his theory.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature.

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions – words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

The world is full of signals that we don’t perceive.

You put three facts together – that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there’s variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited – and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.