232 Quotes by Tom Wolfe

The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61.

The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction.

What was it – this implacable remoteness, this inability to surrender herself to the warmth and comradely feelings of others? Could being an academic star, being applauded over and over again as a prodigy, take the place of all that? She shuddered with a feeling she couldn’t have put a name to. It was the congenital human fear of isolation.

I’m a great believer in outlines.

To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech.

We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

No machines will ever truly fully figure the brain out, because the brain’s performance is constantly altered or else constrained by this inanimate, rogue artifact you can’t control, namely, speech.

Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below. There.

It is the responsibility of intellectuals,” he said, “to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.