E. O. Wilson Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

The three extreme kinds of schizophrenia are unmistakable: the haunted paranoid surrounded by his imaginary community of spies and assassins, the clownish, sometimes incontinent hebephrenic, and the frozen catatonic.

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
New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given.

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
Society increasingly has neglected the substructure of biology to its own peril.

E. O. Wilson
It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules — it is a unique population.

E. O. Wilson
Humanists are the shamans of the intellectual tribe, wise men who interpret knowledge and transmits the folklore, rituals, and sacred texts. Scientists are the scouts and hunters. No one rewards a scientist for what he knows. Nobel Prizes and other trophies are bestowed for the new facts and theories he brings home to the tribe.

E. O. Wilson
Intertribal aggression, escalating in some cultures to limited warfare, is common enough to be regarded as a general characteristic of hunter-gatherer social behavior.

E. O. Wilson
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.

E. O. Wilson
All my life I have placed great store in civility and good manners, practices I find scarce among the often hard-edged, badly socialized scientists with whom I associate. Tone of voice means a great deal to me in the course of debate. I despise the arrogance and doting self-regard so frequently found among the very bright.

E. O. Wilson
On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans:
Wonderful theory, wrong species.

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
To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

E. O. Wilson
The channels of human mental development... are circuitous and variable. Rather than specify a single trait, human genes prescribe the capacity to develop a certain array of traits.

E. O. Wilson
The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

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

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
Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, malignant tertian malaria, filariasis, echinococcosis, onchocerciasis, yellow fever, amoebic dysentery, bleeding bot-fly cysts... evolution has devised a hundred ways to macerate livers and turn blood into a parasite's broth.

E. O. Wilson
I will argue that every scrap of biological diversity is priceless, to be learned and cherished, and never to be surrendered without a struggle.

E. O. Wilson
Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.

E. O. Wilson
True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.

E. O. Wilson
Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.

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

E. O. Wilson
Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.

E. O. Wilson
Evidence has... been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies.... and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers.

E. O. Wilson