E. O. Wilson Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

E. O. Wilson
This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

E. O. Wilson
An enduring environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which the human spirit was born.

E. O. Wilson
There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

E. O. Wilson
Today, thanks to the relentless advance of the science which Newton pioneered, God's immanence has been pushed to somewhere below the subatomic particles or beyond the farthest visible galaxy.

E. O. Wilson
For the naturalist every entrance into a wild environment rekindles an excitement that is childlike in spontaneity, often tinged with apprehension — in short, the way life ought to be lived, all the time.

E. O. Wilson
Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do...

E. O. Wilson
To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs.

E. O. Wilson
The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

E. O. Wilson
Scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success in life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science.

E. O. Wilson
The unsolved mysteries of the rain forest are formless and seductive. They are like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss.

E. O. Wilson
Evolution on a large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

E. O. Wilson
Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.

E. O. Wilson
Who are we to destroy the planet's creation?

E. O. Wilson
That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

E. O. Wilson
Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.

E. O. Wilson
In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival...

E. O. Wilson
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

E. O. Wilson
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

E. O. Wilson
The truth is that we need invertebrates but they don't need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change.... But if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months.

E. O. Wilson
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

E. O. Wilson
The incest taboo is another major category of primed learning.

E. O. Wilson
To search for unasked questions, plus questions to put to already acquired but unsought answers, it is vital to give full play to the imagination. That is the way to create truly original science.

E. O. Wilson
Nationalism and racism, to take two examples, are the culturally nurtured outgrowths of simple tribalism.

E. O. Wilson
The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible.

E. O. Wilson
The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.

E. O. Wilson
The most peaceable tribes of today were often ravagers of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and murderers in the future.

E. O. Wilson
We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity.

E. O. Wilson
We seem to be able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers.

E. O. Wilson
The only other mammalian carnivores that take outsized prey are lions, hyenas, wolves, and African wild dogs. Each... has an exceptionally advanced social life, prominently featuring the pursuit of prey in coordinated packs.

E. O. Wilson