“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”

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.

Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

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.

If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

A man obsessed: obsessed with perfection, sharing, aesthetics, taste, savoir-faire, and much more.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity.

The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

Even in past relationships, that I’m still a woman, I still have vulnerabilities even though my aesthetic feels strong, powerful and full of all of the wisdom in the world, I’m still growing and becoming.

[Being unique] gives so much privilege to people who can make it, rather than having some moral and aesthetic discussions.