People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.
E. O. WILSONThe moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
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I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.
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It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.
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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?
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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.
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We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.
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We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.
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The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
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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.
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If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50-million years.
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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