Top 180 E. O. Wilson Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We’re part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven’t even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.”

— E. O. Wilson

113. “Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.”

— E. O. Wilson

114. “This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

116. “And pigs may fly. And we may be able to terraform and send surface populations to Mars. And Jesus may come next week anyway, so it doesn’t matter one way or the other. All these crazy things run through people’s minds.”

— E. O. Wilson

117. “If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.”

— E. O. Wilson

118. “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

119. “If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.”

— E. O. Wilson

120. “But once the ants and termites jumped the high barrier that prevents the vast variety of evolving animal groups from becoming fully social, they dominated the world.”

— E. O. Wilson

121. “By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.”

— E. O. Wilson

122. “Be prepared mentally for some amount of chaos and failure. Waste and frustration often attend the earliest stages.”

— E. O. Wilson

123. “I’m very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.”

— E. O. Wilson

124. “Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.”

— E. O. Wilson

125. “We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors.”

— E. O. Wilson

126. “The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.”

— E. O. Wilson

127. “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.”

— E. O. Wilson

128. “It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.”

— E. O. Wilson

129. “To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.”

— E. O. Wilson

130. “I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions.”

— E. O. Wilson

131. “Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.”

— E. O. Wilson

132. “Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.”

— E. O. Wilson

133. “If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.”

— E. O. Wilson

134. “In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.”

— E. O. Wilson

135. “It often occurs to me that if, against all odds, there is a judgmental God and heaven, it will come to pass that when the pearly gates open, those who had the valor to think for themselves will be escorted to the head of the line, garlanded, and given their own personal audience.”

— E. O. Wilson

136. “We use pandas and eagles and things. I’d love to see a wilderness society with an angry-looking wolverine as their logo.”

— E. O. Wilson

137. “If we lose half the species, which could happen by the end of the century if we don’t do anything, that’s going to create a big difference down the line in the stability and even the economic potential in the living world. Irreversibly.”

— E. O. Wilson

138. “One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.”

— E. O. Wilson

139. “That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.”

— E. O. Wilson

140. “No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.”

— E. O. Wilson

141. “The diversity of life forms, so numerous that we have yet to identify most of them, is the greatest wonder on this planet.”

— E. O. Wilson

142. “This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.”

— E. O. Wilson

143. “The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”

— E. O. Wilson

144. “So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we’ve been around for only one million years – too soon be sure.”

— E. O. Wilson

145. “When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.”

— E. O. Wilson

146. “America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.”

— E. O. Wilson

147. “So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.”

— E. O. Wilson

148. “In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.”

— E. O. Wilson

149. “Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.”

— E. O. Wilson

150. “The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven’t even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?”

— E. O. Wilson