Top 180 E. O. Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.”

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

105. “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

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

— 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. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

115. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

124. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

126. “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

127. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

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

— E. O. Wilson

132. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— E. O. Wilson

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “It’s always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.”

— E. O. Wilson

149. “Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.”

— E. O. Wilson

150. “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