“If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way.”

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.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.

In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an

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.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

And I discover that we rarely if ever see the totality of another in ordinary social intercourse.

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

The success of SYNC is another proof point that we are doing just that.

My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.