Top 180 E. O. Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

55. “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

56. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

59. “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

60. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

71. “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

72. “People would rather believe than know.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

79. “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

80. “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

81. “Because the living environment is what really sustains us.”

— E. O. Wilson

82. “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

83. “In the early stages of creation of both art and science, everything in the mind is a story.”

— E. O. Wilson

84. “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

85. “I’ve found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they’re communicating but it tells you a great deal – by dialect and tone, content and circumstance – about the quality of the character.”

— E. O. Wilson

86. “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

87. “Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

90. “If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.”

— E. O. Wilson

91. “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

92. “Every kid has a bug period, I like to say, and I just got so fascinated and I had that experience, that wonderful life of being able to go out on my own without really any supervision at all. I just lucked out that way. I was trusted as a kid.”

— E. O. Wilson

93. “Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn’t stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.”

— E. O. Wilson

94. “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

95. “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

96. “The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

98. “The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.”

— E. O. Wilson

99. “But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.”

— E. O. Wilson

100. “The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.”

— E. O. Wilson