Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure.
E. O. WILSONWell, 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.
More E. O. Wilson Quotes
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There doesn’t seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.
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Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.
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Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.
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In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.
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Persist! The world needs all you can give.
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We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
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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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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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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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When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
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I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.
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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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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.
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Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.
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If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.
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True character arises from a deeper well than religion.
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There is no better high than discovery.
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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.
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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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Without a trace of irony I can say I have been blessed with brilliant enemies. I owe them a great debt, because they redoubled my energies and drove me in new directions.
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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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Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.
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Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.
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The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
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Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
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