Top 180 E. O. Wilson Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”

— E. O. Wilson

52. “Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.”

— E. O. Wilson

53. “Exclusion makes us suffer, inclusion makes us thrive.”

— E. O. Wilson

54. “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.”

— E. O. Wilson

55. “One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.”

— E. O. Wilson

56. “When all else fails, men turn to reason.”

— E. O. Wilson

57. “Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.”

— E. O. Wilson

58. “The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.”

— E. O. Wilson

59. “The human race is not divided into two opposing camps of good and evil. It is made up of those who are capable of learning and those who are incapable of doing so.”

— E. O. Wilson

60. “Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.”

— E. O. Wilson

61. “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

62. “I want us to save the creation-not just care about it, but to save it.”

— E. O. Wilson

63. “Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression.”

— E. O. Wilson

64. “I think that’s my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.”

— E. O. Wilson

65. “An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.”

— E. O. Wilson

66. “People respect nonfiction but they read novels.”

— E. O. Wilson

67. “Science and technology are what we can do; morality is what we agree we should or should not do.”

— E. O. Wilson

68. “The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper.”

— E. O. Wilson

69. “In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.”

— E. O. Wilson

70. “The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.”

— E. O. Wilson

71. “Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future.”

— E. O. Wilson

72. “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

73. “I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.”

— E. O. Wilson

74. “I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.”

— E. O. Wilson

75. “Man’s destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.”

— E. O. Wilson

76. “Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct.”

— E. O. Wilson

77. “The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it’s Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.”

— E. O. Wilson

78. “Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.”

— E. O. Wilson

79. “Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.”

— E. O. Wilson

80. “Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.”

— E. O. Wilson

81. “Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?”

— E. O. Wilson

82. “I think we will make it. Because one quality people have – certainly Americans have it – is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

84. “In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I’m a Southerner.”

— E. O. Wilson

85. “We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.”

— E. O. Wilson

86. “Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. About the ambitious pursuit of knowledge, alluding to Icarus of the Greek myth.”

— E. O. Wilson

87. “Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.”

— E. O. Wilson

88. “So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.”

— E. O. Wilson

89. “Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.”

— E. O. Wilson

90. “When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.”

— E. O. Wilson

91. “Destroying a tropical rainforest for profit is like burning all the paintings of the Louvre to cook dinner.”

— E. O. Wilson

92. “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”

— E. O. Wilson

93. “The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.”

— E. O. Wilson

94. “People would rather believe than know.”

— E. O. Wilson

95. “It’s obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life – for 8 billion or more people – without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.”

— E. O. Wilson

96. “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

97. “The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.”

— E. O. Wilson

98. “The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.”

— E. O. Wilson

99. “The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?”

— E. O. Wilson

100. “Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.”

— E. O. Wilson