“Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.”

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.

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice.

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.

Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.

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.

What’s been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path.

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

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

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

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.

I never want to discontinue giving kids opportunities.

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

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.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

Such is O’Brian’s power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next.

…all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.

I really knew I wanted to be Adam, because Adam was the first man. Ant I chose because, if there’s a nuclear explosion, the ants will survive.