Top 180 Stephen Jay Gould Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

2. “We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

3. “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well – for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

4. “We pass through this world but once.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

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5. “Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

6. “Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

7. “The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

8. “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

9. “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

10. “Is uniformitarianism necessary?”

— Stephen Jay Gould

11. “Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory...”

— Stephen Jay Gould

12. “Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don’t struggle to get them right.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

13. “The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

14. “We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life’s continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

15. “Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

16. “When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

17. “Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

18. “The Darwinian revolution is about essence. The Darwinian revolution is about who we are, it’s what we’re made of, it’s what our life means insofar as science can answer that question.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

19. “In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible...”

— Stephen Jay Gould

20. “The median isn’t the message.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

21. “Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

22. “Death is the ultimate enemy – and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

23. “If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy – Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

24. “Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

25. “An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

26. “Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

27. “Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

28. “The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

29. “Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

30. “We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes – one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

31. “All organisms vary, and it’s just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it’s true. Darwin didn’t know the mechanism of heredity, but you don’t have to. You just need to know the fact of it.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

32. “Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

33. “Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

34. “Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

35. “We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

36. “Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

37. “Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

38. “What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life’s history is a constant domination by bacteria.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

39. “The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

40. “If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range...”

— Stephen Jay Gould

41. “Sure we fit. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. But the world wasn’t made for us and it will endure without us.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

42. “Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

43. “If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

44. “Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism – and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

45. “Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

46. “In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life’s history as generalities.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

47. “Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

48. “If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

49. “The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

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50. “People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.”

— Stephen Jay Gould