Top 180 E. O. Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

107. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

109. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

111. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

114. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

116. “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

117. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

129. “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

130. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

134. “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

135. “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

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

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

— E. O. Wilson

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

145. “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

146. “It’s the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.”

— E. O. Wilson

147. “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

148. “Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.”

— E. O. Wilson

149. “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

150. “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