8,157 Quotes About Science

We have come as far as we have because we are the cleverest creatures to have ever lived on Earth. But if we are to continue to exist, we will require more than intelligence. We will require wisdom.

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view.

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man.

They had spent whole summers collecting other ingredients from the forest— micah, chalk, the resin of a pine tree, lichen, some wax, and a drop of dew. After a long and belabored search, Penelope had even discovered some locust wings in the piles of dust beneath her father’s unkempt desk. She had been mixing strange scientific and alchemical potions with her father for as long as she could remember.

Following the principles of meritocracy, the abdicated throne of the Cosmos awaits the deserving to pull the sword from the stone. Effectively, Nature created her adversary, a rogue who threatens the balance on Earth. Maybe the creation of a detrimental race was purposeful, but Nature has been known to experiment continuously and launch failing products from her labs.

Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably out to be. His chief occupation is the extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.

The beautiful green earth.

Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters.