Stephen Jay Gould Short Quotes

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Facts cannot be divorced from cultural contexts.

Stephen Jay Gould
Parochial taxonomies are a curse of intellectual life.

Stephen Jay Gould
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.

Stephen Jay Gould
Never overestimate the depth of anti-intellectual traditions.

Stephen Jay Gould
People often reach correct answers for wrong or illogical reasons.

Stephen Jay Gould
We learn from our errors, perhaps most of all from our shameful mistakes.

Stephen Jay Gould
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

Stephen Jay Gould
Theoretical arguments may be dazzling, but give me a good old fact any time.

Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

Stephen Jay Gould
Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.

Stephen Jay Gould
Evolution is a quirky take of old structures pressed and altered to new functions.

Stephen Jay Gould
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

Stephen Jay Gould
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.

Stephen Jay Gould
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.

Stephen Jay Gould
Homo sapiens... a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

Stephen Jay Gould
Questions are not neutral; they presuppose a list of assumptions that may be long and complex.

Stephen Jay Gould
We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

Stephen Jay Gould
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Stephen Jay Gould
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

Stephen Jay Gould
This is a personal story of statistics, properly interpreted, as profoundly nurturant and life-giving.

Stephen Jay Gould
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.

Stephen Jay Gould
Every item of natural history is both a joy to behold and an instrument of our potential enlightenment.

Stephen Jay Gould
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

Stephen Jay Gould
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

Stephen Jay Gould
The test of any organizing principle is its success in rendering specifics, not its status as abstract generality.

Stephen Jay Gould
Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

Stephen Jay Gould
In science 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent'

Stephen Jay Gould
We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.

Stephen Jay Gould
Interesting fallacies are often subtle, often based upon hidden assumptions, unstated and probably unconsciously held.

Stephen Jay Gould
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.

Stephen Jay Gould